sabotabby | Book squee: "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More"

I just finished Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which, as several have pointed out, is kind of the best title ever. It's about the ordinary lives of young people in the Soviet Union from the 50s to the 80s.

The prevailing images of Soviet life in the West—at least when I was growing up—were of disaffected youth who wanted nothing more than Levi jeans and Coca-Cola, quietly mouthing the hackneyed slogans forced on them by the government while privately listening to censored rock music and plotting the downfall of socialism.

And who could blame them?

Salad with mayonnaise. Check out English Russia's World of Soviet Groceries post.

Yurchak, having actually experienced the system firsthand, takes a more nuanced view, rejecting binaries (surprise! He is a post-modernist) and exploring instead the basic contradictions experienced by Soviet citizens, leading to the USSR's collapse. He begins from Claude Lefort's paradox of modernist ideology:

[T]he split between ideological enunciation (which reflects the theoretical ideals of the Enlightenment) and ideological rule (manifest in the practical concerns of he modern state's political authority) [...] In the society built on communist ideals, this paradox appeared through the announced objective of achieving the full liberation of the society and the individual (building of communism, creation of the New Man) by means of subsuming that society and individual under full party control. The Soviet citizen was called upon to submit completely to party leadership, to cultivate a collectivist ethic, and to repress individualism, while at the same time becoming an enlightened and independent-minded individual who pursues knowledge and is inquisitive and creative.

The result is an analysis that actually allows Soviet citizens some agency, particularly in Yurchak's descriptions of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth), to which most people in the USSR belonged. Loyal Komsomol party secretaries had no problem espousing a critical but supportive view of socialism, while seeing no inherent contradiction with an appreciation of what Yurchak calls the "Imaginary West" as constructed through music, shortwave radio, and subculture. In fact, it was the ideology of their institutions, which in theory promoted inquisitiveness, that led them to pursue these interests.

The first two chapters are a slog through an analysis of authoritative discourse—the "everything was forever" referenced in the title, where content became subservient to the creation of language that removed the author and gave a sense that there was a universal, static truth that everyone new. (The result of this discourse being hilarious copypasta speeches and banners where local Komsomol members would notice grammatical errors but be forbidden by higher-ups to correct them, since the mistake was in the original.) It's dense stuff, mainly dealing with the relationship between the constative dimension of discourse—which can be true or untrue—and the performative dimension—which can only be effective or ineffective. (Thankfully, we get examples. A constative statement is "I am cold"—a description of reality; a performative statement is "I vote for this resolution," which affects the nature of social reality.) At times, I felt I lacked the requisite background in linguistics and po-mo to understand what the author is on about, but he quotes Laibach along with Derrida, so I got through it.

The rest, which focuses on institutions and subcultures, was a much faster, more engaging read. He looks at concepts of svoi ("us," as in "us/them," distinguishing "normal people" and complicated social networks from activists—in this context, unquestioning pro-Soviet ideologues, and dissidents), vnye (occupying a position simultaneously inside and outside the system, but finding the official discourse "uninteresting"), and some very strange performance art. There's some really good primary source research that's just completely engrossing, breaking up the theory with letters, jokes, and strange collections of anecdotes.

Anyway, totally worth a read. If you got through the above blather, you can have a picture of a bootleg record made on an X-Ray: