Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More - Alexei Yurchak

Category: History, Political
Language: English
Keywords: Anthropology History Soviet Union

Written by Alexei Yurchak
Read by Bob Johnson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Release date: 03-10-26
Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins

If you liked the book please think about buying it so they would make more audiobooks of scholarly books.

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.