Moscow University Bulletin. Series 12. Political Science. 2022. 6.

The USSR, created after the Civil War, existed for almost 70 years and collapsed, repeating partially the fate of the Russian Empire. Researchers saw in the “chain” of events of the 20th–21st centuries. The “return” of circumstances similar to the Versailles order. Building power imbalances by ousting individual great powers from the circle of joint strategic decision-makers is again fraught with historical challenges. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the possibility of a “return” on a new “round” of historical challenges in the context of a change in the international order and the cost of overcoming these challenges in the process of geopolitical self-determination of Russia as a great power. The objectives of the article: to identify from the standpoint of historical politics the meanings of “returning” challenges as lessons for explaining the past and present, identifying the contours of the future, to conduct a comparative analysis of the consequences of Versailles and trends in the formation of the modern international order. The comparison revealed the “return” of the Versailles challenge in the form of such a variable as the condition of mass consciousness, capable of fragmenting the national identity of the state, destroying it. What happened to national identity in Russia in 1917 was “returning” at the end of the Cold War in the late USSR. There is a threat of such a “return” in modern Russia.

The article substantiates the incompatibility of the Western institution of political parties with the Russian civilization, its own democratic traditions of public administration and self-organization of people’s life. This is manifested in the current negative attitude of the population towards the institution of political parties, as well as in the critical attitude towards it from the most diverse ideological trends in Russian socio-political and scientific thought. Its criticism can be found in the works of V.O. Klyuchevsky and D.M. Mendeleev, V.I. Lenin and N.A. Berdyaev. Such a critical attitude is quite understandable. In the traditions of Russia, as a Eurasian state, there were its own democratic forms of state self-organization, dating back to the nomadic Kurultai, then Zemstvo councils and, finally, to the Soviet government, which were based on the territorial-corporate principle of the representation of the people in the Authorities. The absolute advantages of the Soviet system of democracy in comparison with the current party system are shown, especially in times of crisis in the life of society, requiring the mobilization of human and material resources. It is concluded that the old slogan “all power to the Soviets” is again becoming very relevant in connection with the prospects for the end of the conflict in Ukraine.

The article defines the specifics of the actor approach in the context of the study of memory policy, and also analyzes the specifics of political parties as mnemonic actors. The collapse of the Soviet Union is used as a historical event demonstrating the difference between the symbolic trajectories of political parties. Based on an analysis of party election programs, the dynamics of ideas about the collapse of the Soviet Union among the parliamentary parties of the VIII convocation was analyzed. The LDPR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turned out to be the most active in terms of the implementation of the memory policy, while the rest of the parties showed a weak interest in updating and interpreting the collapse of the Soviet Union as an element of the party’s memory policy. Such differences may be related to the desire of parties to increase their political status by including their own history in a more significant political context, so those parties that arose in the 2000s are not interested in the symbolic use and appropriation of images of the Soviet past. In addition, it is worth considering generational changes in party elites, due to which the traumaticity of perception of the collapse of the Soviet Union gradually decreases as changes in the composition of governing bodies.

The purpose of this article was a comparative analysis of the images of the collapse of the Soviet Union in television journalism and the comments of Internet users within the framework of commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on the content analysis, as well as comparison with television projects of the late 1990s-2000s, not only a decrease in the total number of television projects dedicated to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the unequivocal dominance of television projects focused on the reproduction of traumatic discourse was revealed. It was concluded that the appeal to the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union on contemporary Russian television is not so much focused on the reconstruction of the events of 1991 as it turns out to be a historical illustration of the socio-economic and political transformations of the current government in the last twenty years. This can be clearly seen in the transformation of the images of the victim, enemies, as well as the strengthening of the rhetoric of reassessment of the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The analysis of the peculiarities of the viewer’s interest on the Internet also showed the dominance in terms of the number of views of television projects that reproduce traumatic discourse. The use of machine learning (ML) methods and sentiment analysis revealed the relative dominance of neutral comments and a rather high percentage of those who negatively assessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, where romanticization of Soviet everyday life, family experience and the influence of media figures of the Russian Internet turned out to be nostalgia factors.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the semantic structure of narratives about the collapse of the Soviet Union in the context of ideological splits. The material of the analysis is Telegram as an information platform that manages media memory in modern Russia. 62 influential political Telegram channels have been identified, reflecting the main ideological positions and splits of public consciousness. Based on a combination of narrative analysis and content analysis, a conclusion is made about the competition of two large narratives about the collapse of the Soviet Union — patriotic and liberal-Westernist, each of which corresponds to a block of Telegram channels. The peculiarity of the liberal-Westernist narrative is the deconstruction of the cultural trauma of the of the Soviet Union. The patriotic narrative uniting the right and left is based on the perception of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national trauma and a negative assessment of Gorbachev’s role. It is concluded that the tragic memory of the collapse of the Soviet Union through the mechanism of cultural trauma becomes part of the collective identity of Russian society, significantly changing it.

In the article, the author refers to the history of the formation of political psychology as a scientific discipline. In the first section, the reader sees a brief overview of the works of Russian and European scientists, which, in essence, had a political and psychological character. The second section shows the participation of US researchers, whose efforts have brought political psychology to the international level. The following sections deal with the stages in the formation of political psychology in Moscow, Leningrad, and then in St. Petersburg. The author notes that at present in Russia there are three main centers for political and psychological research and scientific and pedagogical training of specialists - the Department of Political Psychology of St. Petersburg State University, the Department of Sociology and Psychology of Politics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Research Institute of Political Psychology and Applied Political Research, Pushkin Leningrad State University. The paper presents the main directions of political and psychological research in our country.