Where does he live yesterday?

Part 2. Memory as a construct: from Soviet archives to digital traces

This publication continues a series of articles by sociologist Alexey Semyonov-Troyat about the phenomenon of memory and the state’s attempts to use it to serve itself.

In the first part, we followed how philosophers from Socrates to Bergson wrestled with the riddle: where does the past exist if it no longer exists? By the middle of the 20th century, the answer began to emerge - the past lives in us, but not as a museum collection, but as a continuous work to rethink it.

Now the next question arises, more disturbing: if memory is constructed here and now, who controls this process? Who decides what to remember and what to forget? How does society protect itself from manipulation of the past?

The post-war decades provided unexpected answers to these questions.

1950‒1960s: when memory became the basis of cognition

Moscow, late 1950s. The country is thawing after Stalin's frosts. The 20th Congress exposed the cult of personality, but did not answer the main question: how to live on if the past turned out to be a lie?

Soviet philosophers faced a more acute problem than their Western colleagues. In the West, the nature of memory has been debated in academic classrooms. In the USSR, the question was existential: is it possible to build a future on a falsified past?

In the early 1960s, Jaak Rebane formulated a thesis that sounded almost seditious: social memory is the universal basis of all knowledge, individual and social. It is not history written by party ideologists, but the living memory of people that determines how they understand the world.

What did this mean in practice?

An elderly man who survived collectivization sees the world differently than his Komsomol grandson. They have different memory frames - invisible coordinate grids through which all new information is filtered. Grandfather remembers the dispossession of neighbors, hunger, fear. The grandson remembers pioneer camps, the first satellite, faith in a bright future.

Which one is right?

The question is meaningless. Everyone has their own truth - the truth of their experience. Memory does not store facts, it stores meanings. And these meanings determine how a person will perceive any new information.

Rebane understood: memory is not a passive storage, but an active mechanism for the social determination of cognition. A person experiences the world not from a blank slate, but through the prism of the experience accumulated by society. Therefore, a peasant and an academician, looking at the same landscape, see different things. One is a field where you need to plow. The other is an object of aesthetic contemplation.

But if memory determines cognition, then control over memory is control over consciousness.

This conclusion was not spoken out loud, but was in the air. That is why the Soviet government so manically followed historical narratives, rewrote textbooks after every political turn, retouched photographs, erasing “enemies of the people.”

1970‒1980s: social information and its archives

Vladimir Kolevatov had been working on his concept since the early 1970s, but the book “Social Memory and Cognition” was published only in 1984 - a time when Soviet society was already preparing for perestroika, although it did not yet know about it. He developed Rebane's ideas in an unexpected direction. He looked at memory as an information system - a set of institutions that store and transmit social experience.

What institutions? Libraries, archives, museums, schools, universities. But not only that. The family is also an institution of memory. When a grandmother tells her grandchildren about the war, she conveys not just stories, but a way of understanding the world: what courage, betrayal, and duty are.

Kolevatov introduced a distinction: there is a theoretical core of social memory (systematized knowledge recorded in books and documents) and there is a practical periphery (skills, traditions, unwritten rules).

The theoretical core is controlled by the state quite easily - through educational programs, censorship, and official historiography. But the practical periphery eludes control. It lives in family legends, anecdotes, and habits that are passed on outside official channels.

The Soviet government knew how to manage the theoretical core: write history textbooks, erect monuments to the right heroes, make approved films. But practical memory resisted.

People officially agreed with the party version of history, but at home, in their kitchens, they told other stories - about dispossessed grandfathers, repressed uncles, hunger, injustice. This duality of consciousness - official and private - became a characteristic feature of Soviet man.

Kolevatov did not write this directly (censorship would not have missed it), but it was read between the lines: total control over memory is impossible. Memory resists, hides, mutates, but does not disappear.

At the turn of the century: reminiscences as keys to meaning

The ideas of Rebane and Kolevatov continued to develop in the 1990s, when the collapse of the USSR forced a rethink of all the foundations. Svetlana Dementyeva, who defended her dissertation in Tomsk in 2000, posed a question that grew out of the work of her predecessors, but sounded for new times: what role do reminiscences play in the transmission of values ​​when old values ​​have collapsed?

Reminiscence is a vague memory, an echo of something forgotten, an implicit reference to the past. When a modern politician uses Cold War rhetoric (“enemies surround us on all sides”), he activates reminiscences of those who remember that era. Young people don’t understand the words, but the older generation shudders - emotional memory comes into play.

Dementieva discovered that reminiscences work as bridges between eras. They allow us to convey not facts (facts are quickly forgotten), but the value-semantic content of the past.

Example. The phrase “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten” is a reminiscence of wartime. But it works not as information (few people remember specific battles), but as an emotional code: duty to the fallen, the holiness of the victim, the inadmissibility of betraying memory.

Each generation fills this formula with new meanings, but the emotional charge remains. This is how memory is transmitted not through a retelling of events, but through symbols that evoke the necessary feelings.

Dementieva seemed to be engaged in literary criticism (analysis of cultural reminiscences), but the solution was socio-philosophical: society is governed not so much through laws as through symbols that activate collective memory.

1980s: discovery of sociocode - the operating system of cultures

Mikhail Petrov worked at a time when the word “computer” had not yet become commonplace, but his metaphor turned out to be prophetic. In the late 1980s, he formulated the idea of ​​a sociocode—a basic cultural information processing program that defines how a society encodes, stores, and transmits knowledge.

Each culture has its own “operating system”. The ancient Greek polis encoded knowledge through a personal-nominal system - information was tied to authoritative individuals (Pythagoras said, Plato taught). Medieval Europe used a professional-nominal code - knowledge was transmitted through guild corporations (master - journeyman - apprentice). Modern science works on a disciplinary code - knowledge is organized by subject areas, not by persons.

Sociocode is an invisible matrix that determines:

• What is considered knowledge and what is nonsense.

• Who has the right to broadcast memory (priests? scientists? bloggers?).

• Which events are worth remembering and which can be forgotten.

• How time is structured (cyclical, linear, multidimensional).

The main property of the sociocode is its non-biological and timeless nature. It is not inherited genetically, but is surprisingly stable. The Russian sociocode, shaped by Byzantine Orthodoxy, steppe raids, serfdom and imperial expansion, continues to operate even after changes in political regimes.

Why did the Soviet government so easily reproduce imperial structures? Why is the “vertical of power” perceived by the majority as the norm and not an anomaly? Because it is written in the socio-code - deeper than any ideologies and constitutions.

But sociocode is not monolithic. It has a core (sacred, unshakable meanings) and a periphery (changeable elements). The core is ideas about justice, the proper order of the world, the correct relationship between power and the people. Periphery - specific forms of their implementation.

Attempts at revolutionary change fail when the core is attacked. The Bolsheviks thought they were building a new world, but they reproduced the serfdom system (collective farms = corvee) and the imperial vertical (party = nobility). The sociocode takes revenge for attempts to break it.

1990s: The French open “places of memory”

While Soviet scientists were working under censorship restrictions, a revolution in the understanding of memory was unfolding in the West.

Pierre Nora launched a grandiose project in the 1980s - the multi-volume “Places of Memory” (Les Lieux de mémoire). His thesis sounded paradoxical: we are obsessed with memory precisely because it no longer exists.

What did he mean? Traditional societies lived in memory - rituals, ceremonies, and holidays naturally reproduced connections with the past. Modernization has destroyed this connection. Now we are forced to artificially construct memory through museums, memorials, and memorable dates.

“Memory sites” are materialized points of crystallization of collective identity.

For the French: Eiffel Tower, Versailles, Marseillaise, Bastille Day. For Russians: Red Square, Victory Day, birches, “Kalinka-Malinka” (even if no one remembers the words anymore).

These places act as symbolic anchors holding together a disintegrating identity. But it’s a paradox: the more memorials we build, the more obvious it is that living memory has died. Monuments are tombstones of memory.

German researchers Jan and Aleida Assmann developed Nohr's ideas. They divided memory into communicative (living, transmitted through communication, covers 80–100 years - three to four generations) and cultural (enshrined in texts, rituals, institutions, can exist for millennia).

Communicative memory disappears along with its carriers. The last veterans of the Great Patriotic War are dying - and a living testimony goes with them. Cultural memory remains - parades, films, textbooks. But this is no longer the same. This is a museumized past, devoid of emotional authenticity.

2000s: Russian school reveals depths

Larisa Logunova, in her doctoral dissertation in 2011 (Kemerovo University), created the concept of family-tribal memory as the foundation of the entire architecture of collective memory.

If Halbwachs spoke about “social frameworks”, Nora - about “places of memory”, then Logunova found the basic level - family memory, which connects the individual and the collective, the private and the historical.

The family is the primary laboratory of memory. Here, semantic codes are formed through which a person will then interpret the larger story.

If a family remembers a repressed grandfather, the Soviet era is perceived as a time of terror. If they remember their grandfather - a war hero - as a time of feat and greatness.

Logunova introduced the concept of “mnemonic traces” - imprints of traumatic events in family memory. Collectivization, repression, and war left scars on the body of social memory. These scars are passed down from generation to generation, even when the specific facts are forgotten.

The great-grandson may not know the details of the dispossession of his great-grandfather, but the emotional trace remains - distrust of the authorities, fear of violence, readiness for mobilization. Trauma is not inherited genetically, but through the socio-code of family memory.

Vera Semenova (Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences) developed a biographical method for studying memory. Her approach: you need to collect not just facts, but life stories, where the big History and the small history of an individual destiny are intertwined.

The method of family history restoration (FHR) works as an archeology of meanings. The researcher asks to tell a family story - and receives not a chronicle of events, but a construction of identity. A person tells not what happened, but how he rethought it, what meanings he extracted.

Semenova discovered: each generation rewrites family history, adapting it to current needs. Grandfather told one version. My father remembered differently. The grandson retells the third version. And all three are true. The truth about how each generation constructs its identity through the past.

Trauma and sociocode: when memory breaks down

Now we can connect two lines of analysis - sociocode (Petrov) and trauma (Sztompka, Alexander).

Trauma is a break in the social code, a moment when habitual ways of processing experience no longer work. Collectivization destroyed the peasant sociocode - ideas about family, property, justice, relationships with the land. Repression destroyed the intellectual socio-code - faith in reason, law, human dignity.

After a trauma, society tries to restore the socio-code, but it is a different code - with kinks, distortions, and defense mechanisms. Post-traumatic sociocode includes:

• Distrust as a norm (you can’t trust everyone, power is dangerous).

• Doublethink as a survival strategy (say one thing, think another).

• Oblivion as a defense (not remembering what hurts).

But the trauma doesn't go away. It migrates into the depths - into family legends, unspoken fears, bodily reactions. The grandson of a repressed man flinches at the knock on the door, although he does not know why.

Why is it so difficult for post-Soviet society to build democratic institutions? Because a traumatized sociocode reproduces survival patterns in a totalitarian system: don’t stick your head out, don’t trust, don’t unite.

Why thermodynamics? On the benefits of physical metaphors

The reader has the right to ask: what does physics have to do with it when we talk about memory?

Social thermodynamics is not an attempt to reduce society to formulas, but a heuristic metaphor that helps us see the invisible.

In a closed physical system, energy does not disappear, but is transformed. In a social system, memory also does not disappear - it passes from one form to another. Official history pushes out inconvenient facts, but they do not evaporate. They go into latent layers - family legends, anecdotes, silence.

The second law of thermodynamics says: entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases.

Social memory also tends toward entropy—oblivion, fragmentation, chaos. Preserving memory requires work—rituals, institutions, narratives.

But the main benefit of the thermodynamic metaphor is the understanding of phase transitions. Water remains water when heated, but at the critical point it instantly turns into steam. Society can endure for a long time, but at a critical moment a phase transition occurs - revolution, collapse, transformation of identity.

Trauma is a phase transition in the memory system. After it, the old rules do not work, and a new configuration is formed.

Thermodynamics helps you avoid linear thinking. Memory is not a library where you can simply erase the shelves. This is a living system where any intervention produces unpredictable effects.

2010‒2020: digital memory and algorithmic oblivion

The twenty-first century has radically changed the nature of memory.

Previously, oblivion was a natural process. Now on the Internet nothing is forgotten. Every post, photo, comment is forever. The right to be forgotten has become a legal issue.

But it’s a paradox: with total archiving, we remember less. Algorithms decide what to show us. Facebook*, YouTube, Yandex create personalized memory bubbles - everyone sees their own version of the past.

Algorithms have become the new agents of memory. Previously, the agents were: church, school, state, family. Now there are corporations that own the platforms. Whoever controls the algorithms controls the past.

Digital memory is fragmented and multiple. There is no single narrative - there are millions of personal stories. Is this the democratization of memory? Or its collapse?

Who controls the past today?

We are back to the question we started with: who controls the past?

The answer is no longer as simple as it was in Orwell's 1984. Then it seemed: a totalitarian state could completely rewrite history. Today it is clear: complete control is impossible.

Memory resists in three ways:

• The first is through sociocode. Deep cultural codes are not rewritten by decrees. They live in everyday practices, language, bodily skills.

• The second is through family memory. The state controls textbooks, but cannot get into family conversations (although it tries).

• The third is through digital redundancy. There is so much information that censorship can no longer keep up. If you ban it in one place, it will pop up in ten others.

But this does not mean that there are no attempts at control. On the contrary, they are becoming more sophisticated. Not direct censorship, but algorithmic control - show one thing, hide another, direct attention.

Modern memory wars are fought not with tanks, but with memes, not with censorship, but with information noise.

Epilogue: memory as a battlefield

The path from Socrates to digital algorithms has come full circle.

Socrates asked: where does the past exist? The answer: in constant work to rethink it.

Orwell asked: who controls the past controls the future? Answer: control is possible, but not absolute.

We ask today: is shared memory possible in an era of total fragmentation? The answer has not yet been found.

But one thing is clear:

memory is not a given, but a task. Each generation re-constructs the connection of times. Or it loses it - then society falls apart into atomized individuals without a past and without a future.

* Belongs to Meta, a company recognized as extremist and banned in Russia.