Normal People 
Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak Buy this book
If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written an interesting and provocative book about the way young Soviet Russians talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. For Yurchak, discourse is everything: there is no ‘real world’ outside the world we construct via language. He argues that socialism really existed in the Soviet Union because people not only talked the talk (as they had to do) but at some level actually believed it. He also proposes that the Soviet system collapsed when, and because, people stopped talking the talk: ‘Soviet late socialism provides a stunning example of how a dynamic and powerful social system can abruptly and unexpectedly unravel when the discursive conditions of its existence are changed.’
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Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the editor (with Stuart Macintyre) of Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics.
Other articles by this contributor:
Pessimism and Boys · Sheila Fitzpatrick reads the diary of a Soviet schoolgirl
The Good Old Days · The Dacha-Owning Classes
A Little Swine · Snitching
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