Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak (Russian :АлексейВладимировичЮрчак;born July 21,1960) is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California,Berkeley. [1] His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations in Russia and the post-Soviet states.
Yurchak was born on 21 July 1960 [2] and raised in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg),Soviet Union. [1] He was trained as a physicist and managed a local musical group,AVIA. [3] He then moved to the United States,where he received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1997. [4]
Yurchak coined the term "hypernormalization" in his 2005 book Everything Was Forever,Until It Was No More:The Last Soviet Generation. The book focused on the political,social and cultural conditions during what he terms "late socialism" (the period after Stalinism but before perestroika ,mid-1950s –mid-1980s) which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. [5]
In 2007,Everything Was Forever won the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic,East European,and Eurasian Studies. [6]
Yurchak rewrote the book in Russian,expanding and revising it considerably. It was published in 2014 by Moscow's New Literary Observer and won the 2015 Enlightener Prize in the Humanities category. [7]
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