The Ideas Letter

I once asked the Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, whose Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is the definitive book on the late Soviet period, what he thought of the social category of the sovok. He bristled at the question. A card-carrying social scientist focused on culture and its systems of meaning, Yurchak believed that encapsulating the Soviet person in a catch-all category was absurd. There is indeed something derogatory about the term which refers to a person who expects the state to provide for them, and who labors to get ahead in the deeply bureaucratic, often poorly functioning USSR. Nonetheless, the concept seems useful to address many of the pathologies of the Soviet Union in its “normal” phase after Stalin’s death.

The historian Sergey Radchenko assays similar late Soviet territory in his examination of a new book by Mark Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991. Smith argues that the post-Stalin USSR was neither a frozen dictatorship nor a society in terminal decay, but a functioning and distinctive civilization with its own social order and everyday rhythms. Stephen Kotkin, in his peerless tome Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, came to this terrain first, but his focus was largely the 1930s. Can the civilizational concept also be of utility after the war? 

Arash Azizi has a special place in his political heart for the self-styled democratic communists of yesteryear, above all the great Italian leader Enrico Berlinguer. And rightly so. Azizi offers a remembrance of a significant but largely forgotten current of 20th-century communism—mislabeled, in his view, as Eurocommunism—that was genuinely committed to pluralist democracy and peaceful political change, breaking from the authoritarianism that marked Moscow.