Aristocratism in the Soviet style, or weddings photos through historical and anthropological lenses

The author works with wedding photos of the 1980s, aiming at analyzing them from the historical and anthropological point of view. As a methodological basis for the research, the author relies on the work “A Picture for Memory: Family Histories, Photographic Messages and the Soviet Childhood” by Igor Narskiy. In this regard, each photo is understood in the article as a “photo text”, consisting of a system of visual and verbal codes that require decoding. According to the author, the decoding of the “phototext” makes it possible to extract a number of explicit and hidden meanings from the “body” of photographs that refer to the content of the late Soviet culture. With the help of visual analysis, the author analyzes the content of the photographs: the clothes of the newlyweds, their poses, facial expressions, wedding attributes, background, etc. Then, to understand the cultural meanings embedded in the images, a short historical digression is given, explaining the reasons for the formation of the Soviet wedding ceremony of a new type and the attendant changes in the ritual behavior, dress and self-presentation of the newlyweds in the late 1960s. On the basis of this excursion, the author singles out visual codes, in which the idea of how a solemn act should look like and how the people should look during the marriage, is encrypted. This can speak of the highest degree of hierarchy of the “new” wedding ceremony in the system of the Soviet holidays. The author concludes that the Soviet wedding photographs are inherently a demonstration of the successful passage of a turning point in the life scenario of a “simple Soviet man”. Based on the deciphered visual codes, the wedding of the era of the “late socialism” is, in its content, nothing less than a cultural dramatization, the so-called aristocracy in the Soviet way. In the author's opinion, the examples of this behavior were borrowed from Russian classical literature and its adaptations in the Soviet cinema.