Alexei Yurchak. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 352 pp

Radical-right populism in Spain and the strategy of chronopolitics

“…To date, scholarship on the politicization of time has focused on the discursive and disciplinary tactics of non-democratic regimes in the past, such as fascist Italy (Esposito & Reichardt 2015), Ceausescu's Romania (Verdery 1996), and the Soviet Union (Yurchak 2005). To be sure, late-modern political formations of today have also mobilized temporality to produce and sustain the social polarization that characterizes them.…”

“…3 Despite the historical particularities of its emergence, Vox thus not only mirrors many of the positions and commitments of its transnational analogues, but it deploys their discursive strategies as well. Indeed, as Norris (2020:699) writes, the essence itself of populism may comprise 'a form of rhetoric, a persuasive language'-one that can legitimate claims to authority merely through its performative, rather than referential, meaning (see Yurchak 2005). A number of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have contributed to the body of work cited above, shedding insight on 'the reality-760 Language in Society 52:5 (2023) generating property and the bluster of words' of far-right populist actors in Europe and elsewhere by analyzing the various forms, themes, and tactics that they deploy (McIntosh 2020:1): discourse markers (Sclafani 2018), slogans (Dick 2019), topoi (Wodak 2021), chronotopes (Jereza & Perrino 2020), narrative (Taş 2020), incoherence (Slotta 2020), ambiguity (Krzyzanowski 2020), symbolic warfare (Kramsch 2021), and gestures (Hall, Goldstein, & Ingram 2016).…”

Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region

“…3 Dzhumaliev, 'Meropriiatiia' ( 16). 4 I am inspired by Yurchak's (2005) notion of the 'redundancy' of late Soviet ideological discourse, which I find helpful also for approaching bureaucratic discourse. Such redundancy is of course not unique to Soviet bureaucratic discourse: the quotation from Brown above describes a US context.…”

“…6 This is according to census data from 1970, 1979 and 1989 (published Alexander 2002;Graeber 2015;Gupta 2012;Herzfeld 1992), I focus on the different sorts of rationality which particular interests appeal to. 8 Similarly, Kotkin (1995) and Yurchak (2005) challenge totalitarian accounts of the Soviet state by breaking down the opposition between compliance and resistance, agency and passivity. For Kotkin, getting by in the Stalinist USSR depended on 'speaking Bolshevik'.…”