Young Russians’ View of Their Family’s Soviet Past: Nostalgic, Post-Utopian or Retrotopian?

Abstract

Anna Shor-Chudnovskaya – PhD in Sociology, Researcher, Sigmund Freud Private University, Vienna, (Austria). Address: Freudplatz 1, 1020 Wien, Austria. E-mail: anna.schor-tschudnowskaja@sfu.ac.at

Citation: Shor-Chudnovskaya A. (2018) Young Russians’ View of Their Family’s Soviet Past: Nostalgic, Post-Utopian or Retrotopian? Mir Rossii, vol. 27, no 4, pp. 102–119. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2018-27-4-102-119

This article presents analysis of interviews with young Russians about the lives of different generations of their families in the Soviet Union. The analysis shows that the ideas about the life in the USSR and about family pasts are very fragmented and scarce, and it does not seem to the young people that this past affects their lives today. Nor does the question of the connection between the past and present seem interesting or relevant to them. The narratives about life in the USSR often idealize the circumstances and conditions of this life, but the young people do not express any nostalgic attitudes towards the Soviet past. One of the main findings of the analysis was the extreme inconsistency in the descriptions of life in the USSR, judgments about it and in stories about the attitudes of older relatives. Such contradictions do not seem to be a distinctive feature of the younger generation, but rather continue a Soviet tradition. Overall, young people’s attitude to the Soviet past is determined by at least three factors: the political situation in present-day Russia, the post-utopian heritage of the USSR and pan-European retrotopian tendencies.