Historical memory of the Great Patriotic War in the conditions of social transformation during the 1990s (based on citizen letters to “Radio Rossii”)

In the article based on a mass source - listeners’ letters to “Radio Rossii” (“Radio of Russia”), the author investigates changes in the Russian citizens’ social memory of the Great Patriotic War (the 1941-1945 War) in the conditions of political and ideological pluralism of the 1990s. The collection of epistolary sources, which appeared as a result of creating a new Russian radio station in 1990, is examined on a number of parameters, such as topics of the letters, motivation of the appeal on the radio, the authors’ age and gender, time and geography of writing, etc. The author concludes that in the 1990s, despite the persistence of the main points of the Soviet War myth, a number of new aspects of the memory about the War were included into the Russian public space and influenced the reformatting of the War political narrative. Among them, there are the expansion of the historical memory field due to a significant reduction of taboo topics, the erosion of the serious and heroic representation of the War, the use of the Great Patriotic War concept for interpreting the present and as one of the most important constructs of Russian patrioticс nationalism, and finally the proposal of an alternative concept for the May 9 commemoration.