Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the
peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that
system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely
unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that
Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating,
vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these
characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were
mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life
during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of
the last Soviet generation.
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of
discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the
emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations,
ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His
historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich
ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.
The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to
binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official
culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self
and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for
many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of
socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed
and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.
