Soviet Nostalgia of the Post-Soviet Digital Generation

Abstract

The processes of formation and transformation of collective memory are complex and multifaceted. Research on this phenomenon is carried out in various fields of scientific knowledge and on different planes — from epistemological procedures to specific phenomena, such as nostalgia. This article is devoted to identifying the place and role of nostalgic processes in the collective memory of the digital generation of Russian students. This type of nostalgia can be denoted as “somebody else’s nostalgia”, nostalgia for the times unlived-in, etc. And it requires special study, because of some paradoxicality. From the methodological point of view, the study is based on a combination of analytical and qualitative sociological methods (in-depth interviews). The results of the study showed that nostalgia for the Soviet past is a real phenomenon of today’s collective memory of Russian society, affecting all its social strata and age groups. The reason for this massive spread of the phenomenon is rooted in the general unstable social conditions of human existence in the post­Soviet world, in the loss of confidence in the general idea of progressive course of history, and in progressiste liberation rhetoric in the absence of real socio-­political projects. In the digital generation of Russian students «nostalgia for things Soviet» takes the form of “nostalgia without memory”, in that it is a way of psychological protection from the present by reconstructing the memory of the great past. The space of this memory represents another deformation of the nostalgic phenomenon since it is not formed on the basis of personal emotional experience, which includes longing for childhood and the life lived, but is nourished by the memory of previous generations and by the media.