Chapter 1: Post-Socialism: The Eternal Empire
Hegemony in Chapter 2: Stalin's Chilling Paradigm Shift
Chapter 3: Inverted Ideology: Ethics and Poetics
Chapter 4 Living in 'Bny': Deterritorialized Social Environments
Chapter 5: The Imaginary West: Beyond Post-Socialism
Chapter 6: The True Colors of Communism: King Crimson, Deep Purple, and Pink Floyd
Chapter 7 Dead Irony: Necromancy, Stomps, and Anekdots
conclusion
References
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Translator's Note

Post-socialism, or
An exploration of a time when life was thought to last forever

The book explores a period the author calls “late socialism,” spanning roughly three decades from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s (from the Khrushchev thaw to the Brezhnev stagnation).
This was before the changes brought about by perestroika, a time when the system was still thought to last forever.
Among these, Yurchak pays particular attention to the lives of the “last Soviet generation,” those who spent their youth during the Brezhnev era and who experienced the unique paradoxes of the Soviet system more intensely than any other generation.


With the death of Stalin, the “meta-discourse” that had been the standard for ideological discourse disappeared, creating a situation in which all expressions could be seen as anti-normative, leading to an obsession with fixed and formalized discourse.
This “normalization” has become an end in itself, and the reproduction of normative forms has taken place in all areas of discourse (posters, films, monuments, rallies, reports, commemorative events, school curricula, the organization of urban space).
In this way, the performative dimension of the speech act becomes more important and the declarative meaning of discourse is weakened. Yurchak explains that this “performative turn” is the core principle that operated authoritative discourse and reproduced and organized practice in late socialism.
The weakening of the declarative dimension does not mean that discourse has become an “empty” ritual.
On the contrary, the possibility of unpredictable and indeterminate interpretations, that is, creative reinterpretations of socialist life, has opened up, without the need to be bound by bureaucratic interpretations of declarative meaning.



About “normal life” in some “eternal” world

But what is important here is that these things did not happen 'against' or 'outside' the official Soviet discourse and protocol.
Yurchak explains that for the vast majority of Soviet people, the fundamental values ​​and ideology of socialist life were truly important, and that as “normal people” who believed in the values ​​of the system and lived as part of it participated in the process of reproducing discourse and ritual, various forms of meaningful and creative life spaces opened up.
It was not “dissidents,” as is commonly assumed, but ordinary Soviet people who carried out the work of “deterritorialization” that opened up a space-time of deviation at the heart of the system.
And it was the Soviet system itself that made this colorful life possible!

This book presents a wealth of fascinating episodes that showcase creative deviation and appropriation, from the story of a Komsomol secretary who combined communist ideals with the values ​​of rock music, to rock musicians and doctors who voluntarily became boilermen, to the aesthetics of absurd humor and irony that permeated everyday life in the 1970s and 1980s, to the bizarre performances of artists.
Yurchak argues that these seemingly contradictory situations were not exceptions to the 'norm' of late Soviet life, but rather typical examples of how norms were decentered and reinterpreted everywhere.

So how did this paradoxical society come to an end?
According to Yurchak, the process of perestroika meant, above all, the dismantling of Soviet authoritarian discourse.
The collapse of the party through reform led to the collapse of the discourse of power, and thus the performative reproduction of authoritarian discourse became impossible, as did the creative reappropriation it entailed.
A change in the conditions of discourse has in an instant brought down a system that seemed destined to last forever.



The significance of this book

While it is fascinating to follow Yurchak's theoretical discussion of the inherent conditions of the Soviet system that so quickly transformed the sense of its permanence into an acceptance of the naturalness of its collapse, it is also a pleasure in itself to read the vast amount of anthropological material he has unleashed to do so.
The material Yurchak covers is vast, ranging from private materials from the late Soviet period (letters, notes, diaries, music, amateur films, etc.) that provide insight into the contemporary perspective, to official Soviet publications (speeches, newspapers, films, photographs, comics, etc.), to various interviews, memoirs, and broadcasts mass-produced during and after Perestroika.


Beyond reconstructing the true nature of Soviet life through this book, we can also read it in relation to today's reality.
As Professor Kim Su-hwan, who translated this book, noted, “The strange resonance that the everyday life of the ‘late’ socialist Soviet Union creates with our lives living ‘after’ modern times is worth pondering.” The collapse of the Soviet Union is the closest experience of the ‘end’ that our time remembers.
It would be an important task of our time to understand what kind of premonition and shock that experience was accompanied by, and what kind of subjectivity was involved in the process of its downfall.


※ For this book, Yurchak received the Best Author Award from the Society for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in the United States in 2007 and the Academic Author Award from the Dmitry Zhimin Foundation in Russia in 2015.
He was also evaluated as having made the 'Brezhnev period' a new center of Soviet cultural studies, following the revolutionary, Stalinist, and Thaw periods.
The book's influence was not limited to the academic field.
British documentary director Adam Curtis's film "Hypernormalization" and director Kirill Serebrennikov's film "Leto" are also known to have been directly or indirectly influenced by Yurchak's research, and traces of Yurchak can be found in the works of many other artists.

※ The 'X-ray record' used on the cover of this book was taken by Yurchak himself, and can be said to be an excellent metaphor for this book.
This X-ray record, a homemade recording of Western music on an X-ray plate, “encapsulates the paradoxical situation in which the bones and arteries of the Soviet body provide an intimate space for alien sounds coming from beyond.”