Article
Post-Soviet Collective Memory: Russian Youths about Soviet Past
Russian Federation - in the Russian youth’s mind. The participants of the poll were 100 students from the leading Moscow universities. They were born after the Soviet Union collapse, so the majority of them has a very obscure idea of the Soviet reality.
The results of the research show that the image of the Soviet Union mostly drastically differs from that of Russia in young people’s mind. It is positive in the first case and negative in the second one.
The article considers the phenomenon of nostalgia for the late Soviet times. The author presents the results of his observations over the nostalgia segment of the Russian blogosphere. The article is based on the concepts of the past, collective memory and nostalgia, which have been worked out by M. Halbwachs, D. Lowenthal and S. Boym.
This sientific biography, based on the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, author resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
The Soviet-Afghan war was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Afghanistan was not only the battlefield of the Soviet-American system competition, but was also a place of more or less violent Encounter between "modern" Soviets and "backward" Afghans.
Narrative functions very greatly and are studied in a wide interdisciplinary spectrum. However, one of the functions of the narrative have not yet been studied in detail and therefore deserves a special attention. This is an alarm function: narratives can not only reconstruct past events, but they can also warn on the possible danger, predict the future events and simulate the reactions of recipients. In theoretical narratology, this function is perceived with caution: narrative is usually considered as a form referring to the past. At the same time, the applied research shows that narratives could be actively involved in the practices of predicting the future. This mechanism is largely based on the collective memory. The article deals on the problem of narrative representation of risk and its relation to collective memory.
This article is about nostalgic memory of soviet regional intelligentsia.