Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No more: The Last Soviet Generation

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system, the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse, it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzes why it was so.

Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2014