Folk-history as a problem of interpretation and criticism of sources: lessons of historiography of the postsoviet period (1990's - beginning of 2000's)

The article deals with the problem of distorted perception of the facts of history in the public consciousness, actualized in connection with the popularity of quasi-scientific products on historical issues in mass culture. From the standpoint of the methodology of science, it is shown that such crisis phenomena are not inherently inherent in scientific knowledge, but are a reflex to crises in the social system within, which history is positioned as an institutionally fixed form of social memory in science. The author attributes the reasons for the dominance of quasi-scientific ideas to a departure from national educational traditions with excessive formalization of the results of teaching history in secondary and higher schools. One of the reasons is also the logical strengthening of the entertainment function of the historiographical display of the past in the face of ever-increasing technical possibilities of the “creative resurrection of the past”, in particular, through cinema narratives predisposing to arbitrary “designing history” through artistic fiction.