The battle of identities

Member of our project “After” historian Ivan Kurill writes:

“The common place is the continuity between the 1990s and 2000s and further until the 2020s: from the point of view of institutions, we are now reaping the nineties, and if there were still relative freedoms, then this is exclusively from the weakness of the then state and the personal whim of B. N. Yeltsin. I simplify this look, but only a little.

No, I did not dare to dispute this institutional interpretation, but I thought about this quarter century from the constructivist paradigm. Here, too, usually (often) they write (and I wrote) that the post -Soviet identity was not established, was in a crisis until V.V. Putin came and offered a way out of the crisis in a direction convenient for him. (Again I simplify this point of view, of course). By the way, I remind you that the simplest definition of identity is how we answer the question “who are we?”, And usually there are two strategies in the answer to it - an appeal to the past (“We are the heirs and descendants of heroes and/or martyrs”) and a comparison with another (“We are not, our values ​​are opposite to their values”).

So. If we look at what the state did, propaganda with the help of television, the Ministry of Culture, RVIO and the State Duma itself (both other and other) since 2007, and especially since 2012 with the ideas about the past and the constituting another, it does not look like “exiting from timelessness”, it is more likely to swing the main foundations of identical Under the feet of something already existing. Remember how many monumental propaganda about the heroic past we have been driven over the past 10-15 years. "Memory Wars", "traditional values", anti -Americanism, laws that punish for improper attitude to the past ...

For what?

And then, that over the previous 10-15 years (or even more, if you add recent years of perestroika), the Russians formed even a weak, but completely pronounced identity of the European free people, experiencing a difficult period, but awaiting improvements ahead. (It is not necessary to remind that it was hard for many in the 1990s, it does not contradict anything here). ”