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.'

LRB 25 May 2006 | PDF Download