The effect of «inverted binoculars»: the socio-cultural discourse of Soviet life

The article analyzes the materials of a socio-cultural survey conducted in 2020-2021 in the course of work under a grant from the Russian Science Foundation «Philosophical and anthropological analysis of Soviet life. Prerequisites, dynamics, influence on modernity». The questionnaire developed by the project participants was devoted to clarifying various aspects of Soviet life, as it is remembered and perceived by the inhabitants of modern Russia. Research methodology: socio-cultural and philosophical-anthropological, existential, aesthetic, ideas about the culture of everyday life. The sample consisted of 300 people-residents of more than 20 large, medium and small cities of Russia, more than 90 % of the answers were received mainly to all questions. In the questions and answers, the ideological problems were updated (totalitarianism, the meaning of the concepts «Soviet» and «collectivism» through facts, persons, slogans, abbreviations of the era), everyday (through everyday objects, the life of relatives, everyday situations of respondents, memories of family events and traditions) and aesthetic (through preferences in the field of culture, the choice of phenomena of different types of art as objects of interest, in particular, cinema, literature, painting, architecture). Such cultural phenomena as a political joke, which in Soviet times was both a testimony of the era and part of a mentally determined picture of the world, are actualized. The problematics of the issues did not assume an evaluative categoricity, the principle of interdisciplinary pluralism was used. Two aspects of the obtained results are characteristic. First, when analyzing the options chosen or proposed by the respondents during the answers, it became obvious that there was an aberration in the perception of events that at the time of their relevance seemed significant and even fateful. Secondly, the results-in terms of the diversity of judgments and the absence of bias, in the attraction to positive sociophilosophical assessments of the past-mostly coincided with the expectations of the researchers.