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osprey_archerAlexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation is one of those non-fiction books that is chock full of interesting information, but also sometimes you want to go out and get into a fistfight in the parking lot with the author about how he presents it.
First of all, the entire first chapter is the kind of academic gobbledigook that takes twenty pages to say what it could have said in two. (“Is this book really worth reading?” I demanded ofskygiants who assured me that it does contain actual information eventually). While it is, perhaps, entertaining to read a take-down of late-Soviet gobbledigook written in postmodern academic gobbledigook, the joke wears thin after about two pages.
Once you get past the gobbledigook, Yurchak’s basic project is to push back against the dichotomy of oppression/resistance that many Western commentators apply when talking about the Soviet Union. Overall, I agree with his thesis. In fact, I think the humanities as a whole could stand to step away from the entire theme of Resistance to the Hegemony for a while, especially the kind of analysis that counts anything less than slavish and wholehearted adherence to the Hegemony as Resistance. At some point one should ask oneself why this apparently ubiquitous Resistance seems so largely ineffective.
However. Yurchak rejects the oppression/resistance dichotomy so totally that, rather than seeing resistance everywhere, he sees it nowhere. Now, of course he’s right that people can see and make fun of the absurdities within a system while still believing fervently in the basic ideals of the system. But there comes a point when one may believe in the ideals but reject the system as a possible method for ever reaching them, and I feel this attitude is exemplified in ubiquitous late Soviet jokes like:
“What does the phrase capitalism is on the edge of the abyss mean?
It means that capitalism is standing on the edge looking down, trying to see what we are doing there.”
If not open and avowed resistance, this surely betrays at least a crushing lack of enthusiasm.
But, although I sometimes vehemently disagreed with his analysis of his facts - those facts are so interesting! A delightful collection of anekdoty like the above! The fact that Komsomol committee members would sometimes get out of classes or work by claiming “urgent business at the raikom (district office)” and actually sneak off to have tea together. The entire chapter about people in late Soviet times who got jobs in boiler rooms specifically because the job was totally undemanding and they could spend the whole time there pursuing their true passion, which might be, say, medieval history. Fantastic. Wonderful details. I love it.
First of all, the entire first chapter is the kind of academic gobbledigook that takes twenty pages to say what it could have said in two. (“Is this book really worth reading?” I demanded of
skygiants who assured me that it does contain actual information eventually). While it is, perhaps, entertaining to read a take-down of late-Soviet gobbledigook written in postmodern academic gobbledigook, the joke wears thin after about two pages. Once you get past the gobbledigook, Yurchak’s basic project is to push back against the dichotomy of oppression/resistance that many Western commentators apply when talking about the Soviet Union. Overall, I agree with his thesis. In fact, I think the humanities as a whole could stand to step away from the entire theme of Resistance to the Hegemony for a while, especially the kind of analysis that counts anything less than slavish and wholehearted adherence to the Hegemony as Resistance. At some point one should ask oneself why this apparently ubiquitous Resistance seems so largely ineffective.
However. Yurchak rejects the oppression/resistance dichotomy so totally that, rather than seeing resistance everywhere, he sees it nowhere. Now, of course he’s right that people can see and make fun of the absurdities within a system while still believing fervently in the basic ideals of the system. But there comes a point when one may believe in the ideals but reject the system as a possible method for ever reaching them, and I feel this attitude is exemplified in ubiquitous late Soviet jokes like:
“What does the phrase capitalism is on the edge of the abyss mean?
It means that capitalism is standing on the edge looking down, trying to see what we are doing there.”
If not open and avowed resistance, this surely betrays at least a crushing lack of enthusiasm.
But, although I sometimes vehemently disagreed with his analysis of his facts - those facts are so interesting! A delightful collection of anekdoty like the above! The fact that Komsomol committee members would sometimes get out of classes or work by claiming “urgent business at the raikom (district office)” and actually sneak off to have tea together. The entire chapter about people in late Soviet times who got jobs in boiler rooms specifically because the job was totally undemanding and they could spend the whole time there pursuing their true passion, which might be, say, medieval history. Fantastic. Wonderful details. I love it.
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Date: 2024-11-17 02:33 am (UTC)I'm definitely curious about this book but I wonder how much of it will be new information to me (raised in America by Russian immigrants) and how much of it will be things I've already heard my family tell me, because I do want a fuller picture of the soviet union that isn't 100% My Friends and Family's Experiences, but I tried reading Svetlana Alexeyevich's Secondhand Time recently and couldn't get into it... I think her style is just a little too abstract/collage-y for my tastes though idk
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Date: 2024-11-18 06:41 pm (UTC)