Soviet anniversary as an instrument of memory policy (illustrated by official anniversaries of Karelia's statehood)

The article studies the official anniversaries of Karelia's statehood as an information cause for a series of publications on the history of the region in the main republican newspaper Leninskaya Pravda (Lenin's Truth). Preparations for the celebrations allowed the local authorities to reproduce the image of the past on the pages of the print media as a justification for the legitimacy of the existing government. Due to the representation of the past in anniversary publications, the history of Karelia's statehood between the 1940s and the 1980s was “implanted” into the historical tradition of the formation and development of the Soviet state. The crisis of relations between the republic and the union center in the 1990s, economic difficulties, and growing national contradictions led to the attempts of Karelia's authorities to use the past to justify a new political course.