The purpose of the article is to consider the transformation of everyday life in the post-revolutionary period in the context of the restructuring of mass ideas about the past. The author's task was to identify the main ways to address the history of everyday life in the framework of building the Bolsheviks policy of historical memory and describe the features of their implementation. Source database of the research is presented by the materials of the periodical press, journalistic publications devoted to the restructuring of everyday life, and various funds of Central state archive of Saint Petersburg and Central state archive of historical and political documents of Saint-Petersburg. In post-revolutionary situation, the daily life of a person was evaluated including the context of its correlation with the past. Opposition to the past and its symbolic rejection have become integral parts of a “new world” building. This required discrediting the pre-revolutionary era, ridiculing it, denigrating it, and forming a picture of the “gloomy past”. The author comes to the conclusion that the success of the Soviet policy of memory was largely due to a fundamentally different attitude to history – as a component of social transformations, an important part of the Soviet cultural revolution that covered literally all spheres of society. Man was not free from history, and willing or not daily demonstrated his attitude to it through habits, communication with other people, clothing, and various leisure practices.
Translated title of the contributionThe politics of memory and the construction of everyday life: the Bolshevik experience of the 1920s
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to)19-35
JournalИстория повседневности
Issue number3(15)
StatePublished - 2020

    Research areas

  • history of everyday life, politics of memory, history of leisure, urban history, historical symbols

    Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities(all)

ID: 71279730