The present article is a critical engagement with Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. It contends that, as rich as Yurchak’s insights on the language culture of Brezhnev’s Stagnation have proven to be, his account ends up seriously misrepresenting the Stalinist episode in the life of Soviet ideology. This misrepresentation is due, in large part, to the problematic use of post-structuralist models, and particularly of Claude Lefort’s theorization of ideology in the modern era. Through a re-examination of Lefort’s “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” the present article advances an alternative understanding of the discursive “shift” in Soviet ideology. Yurchak has argued that, before being set afloat in the 1950s, Soviet official discourse was held together through the figure of the “external master,” Stalin himself. The master is able to mask what Yurchak terms the “Lefort paradox” of Soviet ideology and which he glosses as the divergence between ideological enunciation and ideological “rule.” Yet Yurchak misreads Lefort’s theory, and specifically the latter’s references to “master” and “rule.” When these terms are restored to their proper theoretical significance, it becomes possible to formulate in a new way the contradictory duality at the heart of Soviet ideology. The article contends, contra Yurchak, that this is not the duality of enunciation and actual exercise of power; but rather the split internal to ideological discourse, between the “rule of reality” and the “reality of the rule.” The “shift” of Soviet ideological discourse begins as a slippage between these two ideological representations, and not as the removal of some anchor external to representation.

本文是对阿列克谢·尤尔恰克 (Aleksei Yurchak) 的《一切都永远直到不再：最后的苏联一代》的批判性参与。它争辩说，尽管尤尔恰克对勃列日涅夫停滞时期的语言文化的见解已被证明是丰富的，但他的叙述最终严重歪曲了苏联意识形态生活中的斯大林主义情节。这种误解在很大程度上是由于后结构主义模型的使用有问题，尤其是克劳德·莱福特 (Claude Lefort) 对现代意识形态的理论化。本文通过重新审视莱福特的《现代社会意识形态起源纲要》，提出了对苏联意识形态话语“转变”的另一种理解。尤尔恰克认为，在 1950 年代浮出水面之前，苏联官方话语是通过“外部主人”，即斯大林本人的形象而集中在一起的。大师能够掩盖尤尔恰克所说的苏联意识形态的“莱福特悖论”，并将其解释为意识形态表述与意识形态“规则”之间的分歧。然而尤尔查克误读了莱福特的理论，特别是后者对“主人”和“统治”的提及。当这些术语恢复其适当的理论意义时，就有可能以新的方式表述苏联意识形态核心的矛盾二元性。文章主张，与尤尔恰克相反，这不是权力的宣示和实际行使的二元性；而是意识形态话语内部的分裂，在“现实的规则”和“规则的现实”之间。苏联意识形态话语的“转变”开始于这两种意识形态表征之间的滑动，而不是移除了表征外部的某些锚点。