Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
The Last Soviet Generation

My extensive experience of book reviewing says that there are resonant topics, there are those that most leave indifferent, but if this is a nonfiction about the late Soviet period, then there will be a response. Both supporters of the Union and its haters will scold the author of the review along w......more

Taught this book for my Soviet culture course, my students were bored silly. Partly Yurchak's writing - cultural anthropology, cultural studies, the whole lingo, etc. - but also, and more to blame, was the relatability factor, the so what? question. As a study of Everyman's modus operandi in a dicta......more

I was initially clued into this book after watching Hypernormalization and reading the surrounding interviews Adam Curtis gave in support of the film. He explicitly references this book and some of its general concepts, such as the normalizaiton of specifically reproduced authoritarian language and......more

Starting with Lefort’s Paradox—the split between ideological enunciation (which reflects the theoretical ideals of the Enlightenment) and ideological rule (manifest in the practical concerns of the modern state’s political authority), the author differentiates one action into two dimensions, i.e. th......more

A difficult 3 stars to give, because in many respects this is an amazing book. My issues with it are small, but significant in the overall project, I think. Yurchak starts from a brilliant premise: Stalin played a fundamental role in transforming the way that the Soviet state conveyed authority and t......more