BACK TO THE USSR, OR GAMES OF QUASI-HISTORICAL IMAGINATION: FICTITIOUS LATE SOVIET CHILDHOOD IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN POPULAR CULTURE

Abstract

At the turn of the 2010s, one more plot, which implies the physical movement of the protagonist back in time in order to change the past, has begun to be actively developed in modern Russian science fiction — a return to the USSR, and not to the years of the Great Patriotic War, where the first authors of current alternative science fiction sent their heroes, but to the much more peaceful years of “zastoy”, in the late Soviet Union of Brezhnev times. In many works, the hero, during such a transfer, ends up in a child’s body and thereby is forced to live through late Soviet childhood — the way the author depicts it. In most works of this kind, this late-Soviet childhood is endowed with unconditionally positive characteristics, and this circumstance prompts an attempt to study the social basis of such works: one can often come across the opinion that such an interpretation implies a collective, albeit commercialized, nostalgia, but, given that the authors of these works, as a rule, already belong to the post-Soviet generation, other mechanisms of commemoration seem to be at work here. Using the methodology of memory studies, the article substantiates the need for closer research attention to the products of modern popular culture as potentially effective ways of imagining the past.

Keywords: history of the USSR, Soviet childhood, popular culture, alternative fiction, symbolic politics, memory studies