DOI:10.18503/2658-3186-2022-6-4-29-34
Abstract. The article examines the phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet past among modern Russians. The author investigates the causes of such sentiments, using the social network VKontakte as a source. The study of social networks is particularly interesting and important due to the fact that they come to be a tool for shaping the worldview of young people. Thus, the social network seems to be a historical source and at the same time a way of transferring and transmitting information and knowledge. The content of the most popular social network in modern Russia has become not only a source for the study, but also allowed to observe in detail what exactly an ordinary person or VK resident misses and keens on today. First, as a result of the entire state collapse, there have been formed some ideological vacuum within a newborn country, which over time began to accumulate some memories about the past «Soviet» reality. Some people started recalling their youth, others their financial well-being. In any case, a peculiarity of Internet content is that the participants’ memories from Internet communities about the Soviet realism create an ideal mythology about life in the USSR, depriving it, from the researcher's point of view, of its objective reality. Moreover, social networks, thanks to their technical capacities, multiply a lot of distorted and idealized information at great speed, replacing with it the textbooks and scholarly articles. Using M. Hirsch's post-memory theory, the author concludes that the post-memory of the «Soviet» being does not come to the end with just one generation that rose after the USSR witnesses, but is passed on to successive generations of some social groups, giving emotional coloring to its identity.
Keywords: USSR, Soviet, social network, nostalgia, ideology, historical memory, historical source.
Author:
Elena М. Buryak, Associate Professor, Candidate of History, Associate Professor at the Department of World History, Nosov Magnito-gorsk State Technical University (NMSTU), Magnitogorsk, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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For citation
Buryak E. М. Mythologization of the Soviet Past in the Social Network Vkontakte Thirty Years after the USSR Collapse, Gumanitarno-pedagogicheskie issledovaniya [Humanitarian and pedagogical Research], 2022, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 29-34.