Normal People

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak
Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95, December 2005, ISBN 0 691 12117 6

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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Vol. 28 No. 10 · 25 May 2006 » Sheila Fitzpatrick » Normal People (print version)
Pages 18-20 | 3515 words

Letters

From Alexei Yurchak

Sheila Fitzpatrick describes my position in Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More, as ‘postmodern’, which she takes to be the belief that there is no reality outside language or discourse (LRB, 25 May). In fact, my book argues the exact opposite: not only that there is a real world outside language, and that it is impossible for language ever to account for that world in full, but that this is precisely why alternative realities and internal displacements were part of late socialism yet remained ‘invisible’ (unaccounted for in language) until the collapse of the Soviet state. Some ‘postmodern’ theories reduce reality to language and Soviet socialism to postmodernism (e.g. Mikhail Epstein’s model), but I argue that Soviet people were able ‘to engage in the production of new forms and meanings of reality that were tangible, multiple and grounded in the real world … Contrary to Epstein’s claim that “reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist,” that different reality, in fact, exploded into the Soviet world in powerful, multiple and unanticipated forms.’ Fitzpatrick is incorrect, too, that the book’s object is to study the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She claims that ‘one would have to be very committed to a belief in the “primacy of language” [her phrase] to accept the notion that the “profound internal displacement” [my phrase] within the Soviet system that led to its collapse had only discursive causes.’ In fact, my book neither argues for the primacy of language nor claims that the internal displacement of the late Soviet system had ‘only discursive causes’. Instead, it argues that this displacement was a product of a particular relationship between authoritative discourse and the forms of social reality for which it could not fully account. Furthermore, the book’s object of analysis is not ‘the causes for the collapse but … the conditions that made the collapse possible without making it anticipated’. The question is not what led to the collapse, but why it was not expected.

Finally, according to Fitzpatrick, I claim that ‘the Soviet collapse was a totally hermetic, circular process.’ The book does not make this claim, which she nonetheless goes on to dispute: ‘The perestroika that Gorbachev initiated was surely an intervention, not part of a circular process.’ In fact, the point of the book’s theoretical argument is that perestroika was not part of the circular process. Gorbachev, I wrote, ‘unwittingly broke with the circular structure of authoritative discourse’ and reintroduced ‘the voice of an external commentator or editor of ideology who could provide expert metadiscourse grounded in “objective scientific knowledge” located outside the field of authoritative discourse.’

It is Fitzpatrick’s slighting of theory that causes these problems. To understand major social ruptures – in this case, why the Soviet collapse was so unexpected, not only by Soviet citizens but also by external analysts and scholars – requires both empirical investigation and theoretical consideration, not the one rather than the other.

Alexei Yurchak
University of California, Berkeley