In the Year 2017 – A Soviet Fantasy of the Future.pdf

Slavic Review 72:2 Summer 2013

The present article focuses on the ‘Scientific-Technical Revolution’ (STR), tracing the Soviet leadership’s bid for the future throughout the post-Stalinist period and examining how it came to be challenged by the scientific-technical and literary intelligentsias of the country. I argue that what was claimed to be the main strength of official Soviet thought on the future – its holistic character – was also its most serious limiting factor. Unlike Western futures studies, which assumed a plurality of possible futures and stressed the need to strategically choose between them on the basis of preferences and values, orthodox Soviet theoreticians framed the prospective development of mankind in terms of a single future that demanded an all-encompassing vision. The resulting Soviet future discourse was unwieldy and restrictive, and left the Soviet Union ill-prepared to deal with the onslaught of ‘reflexive modernity’ that reached the country in the 1970s.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Vol. 21. 4 , 2019

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Russia and Russian have been an important part of my life. In 1959, when I was 20, I was a guide in Moscow at the first exchange of exhibitions between the USA and the USSR. “Glimpses” begins with a long account of encounters in the Khrushchev era, followed by travel journals from later trips in the Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Putin eras. I went back twice to my mother's hometown in Ukraine, with a chilling encounter in 1966 that could have been written by a combination of Gogol and Kafka.

2007

Abstract: My paper today will consider the case of Russia in the early 1990s in order to disentangle a less local phenomenon that Judith Halberstam has called the “insidious linking of perverse modernity and the perverse body in certain instantiations of globalized thinking.”1 How do ...

Slavic Review, 2013

Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly d...

New Perspectives, 2019

Journal of Futures studies, 2019

The paper analyzes the images of the future of Russia, which exist in the conscience of representatives of the modern Russian society. We have developed a comprehensive humanitarian analysis (CHA), which allows us to find a common denominator of social expectations in sources of different types. We introduce into scientific research such groups of sources as scientific forecasts, government and political programs, opinion polls and works of modern Russian literature. The results of our study include a description of the image of the future, which we have designated as "its own way" and two options of this way.

Princeton University Press, 2006

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek: "Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes) Abstract: 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. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Abstract: The development of prediction and forecasting in the social sciences over the past century and more is closely linked with developments in Russia. The Soviet collapse undermined confidence in predictive capabilites, and scenario planning emerged as the dominant future-oriented methodology in area studies, including the study of Russia. Scenarists anticipate multiple futures rather than predicting one. The approach is too rarely critiqued. Building on an account of Russia-related forecasting in the twentieth century, analysis of two decades of scenarios reveals uniform accounts which downplay the insights of experts and of social science theory alike.