Why did the Soviet era, which seemed to many eternal and unshakable, suddenly become a thing of the past overnight? Anthropologist Aleksey Yurchak believes that the explanation for this sudden collapse of the Soviet system should be sought in the peculiarities of thinking and language that developed during the period of late socialism.
After the debunking of the cult of personality, the official ideology lost its authoritative figure, which had the right to give the only correct interpretation of various phenomena and processes in the state. The attention of the country’s leadership switched to the form of ideological statements, which did not allow personal interpretations and creative development of the canon. But it was precisely this situation of a frozen language, according to the anthropologist, that made it possible for citizens to simultaneously develop their meanings. The manifestation of these meanings during the years of perestroika, which shook off the rags of the official language, created the very effect of surprise. Arguing with the scientific model adopted in Sovietology, in which existence under the conditions of that system was reduced either to protest or to pretense, Alexei Yurchak believes that the life of a “normal” (the author’s term) Soviet person was neither one nor the other. Ideology became something like a natural phenomenon: it was present everywhere, but it was quite possible to live with it. And even find something attractive in its formulas. It is no coincidence that already in the 90s, many became disillusioned with the new system of values, which did not give them the former sense of solidarity and high purpose. The anthropologist makes the assumption that post-Soviet nostalgia is a yearning for those inner meanings that were close to a huge number of people.
New literary review, 664 p., 2015.