NATIONAL DISCOURSES OF SOVIET HISTORICAL POLICY DURING THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF 1941-1945 (BASED ON SIBERIAN PERIODICALS)

The article studies the infiltration of the national discourse, the Russian (wider Slavic) myth into the USSR historical policy during the Great Patriotic war of 19411945 as reflected in Siberian periodicals and archival documents. It is emphasized that this transformation had situational preconditions related to the strategic choice of the Soviet Union for Slavic unity in the fight against Nazi Germany as well as psychological origins, appealing to the deep archetypes of national consciousness. The intellectual potential of North Asia as well as that of the whole country was summoned up as the "school of mass political education", which brought about the revived cult of national heroes and the neo-romantic representation of the Russian nation and the Slavic peoples as having exceptional qualities and opposed to the German world. Such trends were reflected in newspaper publications devoted to the heroic pages of Russian history (the Battle on the Ice, the struggle against foreign invaders during the Time of Troubles, the Patriotic War of 1812, World War I, etc.) as well as to Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, M.I. Kutuzov and others. It is noted that the exclusivity of the Russian nation was opposed to the ethno-cultural traditions of the Germans. At the same time, the politics of memory in the war period shows a deep contradiction between the representation of Germany as of an ethnogenetic enemy of the Slavs and an attempt to preserve the Soviet international view and mercy to the people affected by the "plague". This contradiction can be seen in the general eclecticization of historical policy, which, on the one hand, appealed to the primordial national symbols and, on the other hand, preserved the traditional Soviet vocabulary, rhetoric and symbols, which ultimately resulted in the primacy of pride for the people chosen not only to liberate the world from Nazism, but also to carry out the Great Revolution of 1917.