Alexei Yurchak

Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

This paper was prompted by a personal question that has puzzled many former Soviet people, myself included, since the late 1980s: How to make sense of the sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way of life, in which we grew up and lived? What was it about the Soviet system that made its “collapse” appear completely unimaginable and surprisingly fast not only to most Western Sovietologists but also to most Soviet people? The experience of the unexpectedness and abruptness of the collapse is reflected in diverse materials I have collected in Russia in the past ten years. This question is not about the “causes” for the collapse but about its “conditions of possibility”: what conditions made the collapse possible while keeping that possibility invisible ? To begin addressing this question, we must analyze how the particular “culture” of Soviet socialism invisibly created the conditions for the collapse and at the same time rendered it unexpected. The period when these conditions emerged, the approximately thirty years preceding the beginning of perestroika (the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), I shall call Soviet “Late Socialism.”

Necro‐Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non‐Soviet

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations such as the “Soviet collapse”: Since members of these groups claimed that anything political was profoundly uninteresting to them and that neither support of nor opposition to the Soviet system was relevant, is it possible to think of them politically at all? Since the language of resistance and opposition does not capture their alternative subject positions, what political language is required to describe them? What were the implications of this peculiar “politics” for the Soviet state and its momentous collapse? Is this form of politics relevant today in other contexts?

Privatize your name: Symbolic work in a post‐Soviet linguistic market

This paper analyzes the new names given to Russian private businesses that have appeared after the collapse of the Soviet State in 1991. By naming new private ventures their owners - members of the new business class - attempt to privatize public space not only legally but also symbolically and linguistically. They strive to construct their particular new version of social reality, to represent it as positive and meaningful, and to impose themselves publicly as legitimate authors, owners, and masters of this new reality. This paper proceeds on several distinct levels of analysis. First, it analyzes a number of discourses, representing various subcultures and periods of Soviet and Russian history, from which new business names draw their complex meanings. Second, it considers concrete linguistic and semiotic techniques that are employed by the new names in this process. Third, it examines the cultural and social implications of this process of nomination for post-Soviet developments in the Russian society

The canon and the mushroom

This essay focuses on a paradoxical transformation that happened within Soviet ideological discourse at the very end of perestroika, around 1990–91. The Party’s attempts to revitalize Soviet ideology by returning to the original word of Lenin unexpectedly produced the opposite result. The unquestionable external Truth from which Soviet ideological discourse drew its legitimacy—and that had always been identical with Lenin’s word—suddenly could no longer be known. This shift launched a rapid unraveling of the Soviet communist project. At the center of this unexpected transformation was the search for the true Lenin—a kind of Lenin that Soviet party theorists, bureaucrats, historians, and scientists hoped was still hidden in the midst of his unpublished texts and unknown facts of his biology, life, and death.

Sacred necropolitics: A dialogue on Alexei Yurchak’s essay, “The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse”

In this meditation, Anya Bernstein and Alexei Yurchak discuss Yurchak’s essay, “The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse,” which is published in the current issue. They elaborate on some points in the essay that are central for the understanding of the figure of “Lenin” and its role in Soviet history, take them in new directions, and link them to other topics that are relevant to anthropology. The themes discussed include sacredness and blasphemy; death, resurrection, and immortality; language, intentionality, and responsibility; voice, ventriloquism, and truth; and more.