It Was Forever Until It Ended

For Soviet people, the collapse of the socialist system was both an absolute surprise and something quite foreseeable. This dramatic event exposed an unusual paradox: despite the fact that most people perceived the Soviet system as eternal and unchanging, they were fundamentally always ready for its breakdown. In the book by Professor Alexei Yurchak of the University of California, Berkeley, the system of “late socialism” (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) is analyzed in the perspective of this paradox.