Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak () is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations in Russia and the post-Soviet states.
Early life and education
Yurchak was born on 21 July 1960 and raised in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), Soviet Union. He was trained as a physicist and managed a local musical group, AVIA. He then moved to the United States, where he received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1997.
"Hypernormalization" 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.
In 2007, Everything Was Forever won the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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.