http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8102.html

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

Alexei Yurchak

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 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.

Alexei Yurchak is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of 
California, Berkeley.

Endorsements:

"In this remarkable book, Alexei Yurchak asks: How can we account for the 
paradox that Soviet people both experienced their system as immutable and 
yet were unsurprised by its end? In answering this question, he develops a 
brilliant, entirely novel theory of the nature of Soviet socialism and the 
reasons for its collapse. The book is must reading for anyone interested in 
this most momentous change of contemporary history, as well as in the place 
of language in social transformation. A tour de force!"--Katherine M. 
Verdery, author of What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

"Alexei Yurchak brilliantly debunks several widely held misconceptions about 
the lived experience of late socialism in Soviet Russia, and does so through 
a compelling dossier of materials, all creatively conceived, organized, and 
analyzed. The writing is fluid, accessible, interesting, and beautifully 
structured and styled."--Nancy Ries, Colgate University, author of Russian 
Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika

"This ambitious book admirably combines a new theoretical approach with 
detailed ethnographic materials. Written in a clear and engaging style, it 
is both thorough and precise, and provides a new and convincing insight that 
will definitely be central to all serious discussions of Soviet-type systems 
for years to come--namely, that the shift in Soviet life from a semantic to 
a pragmatic model of ideological discourse served to undermine the 
ideological system."--Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge, and author 
of The Unmaking of Soviet Life

Paper | November 2005 | $24.95 / £15.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12117-6
Cloth | November 2005 | $59.50 / £38.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12116-8

336 pp. | 6 x 9 | 15 halftones. 3 line illus. 4 tables.