Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
The Last Soviet Generation
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Average rating4
15
The Last Soviet Generation
Ratings2
Average rating4
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.
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I saw this title recommended on a piece I was reading about Hypernormalization and the US. This work also lent to the Adam Curtis documentary also called Hypernormalization, published 2016 (haven't watched it, seems far more out there than this scholarly work).
The crux of the idea is this: That people are aware that the society/rules/regulations that dictate their life aren't working but have to endure them away because to do away with that scaffolding would be unfathomable. Alternatives that buck the mold are rejected because they subvert tradition. Tradition loses all meaning because it is an echo of an echo of an echo. If you wrap this sociological blanket around life at the end of the Soviet Union, it's not a stretch at all.
Yurchak gets heavy into semiotics with regard to communist meetings and how the language couldn't change, was edited in a group setting, the personal voice was lost. And so everything grew to have two layers of meaning, the sort of described spirit of the word meaning, and then the signifier of what it had come to represent by the late 1970s-1980s. I honestly hadn't thought much about semiotics since college. These chapters in particular remind me so much of ad word copyrighting. Plugging in different phrases where the only goal is page rank and the intelligible content is an afterthought.
This book is not written for a casual reader and it is not particularly digestible. It's dense and the aha moments are difficult to come by. I wish I could say I enjoyed it more, it was a challenge to read and I read a lot of non-fiction. I wish a more accessible book would be written on this topic because it's something I'm fascinated by as an American in this crumbling moment.
