The Memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in the regional Internet space: the experience of discourse analysis

The article was prepared with the support of the RFBR and EISI grant

¹ 21-011-31153

The memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 continues to be one of the most important symbols that form the fundamental values and semantic guidelines of mass historical consciousness in modern Russia. Long-term public opinion polls clearly indicate the huge interest of society in the Victory Day commemorations and the dominance of the positive attitude of society to its most significant actions (the Immortal Regiment, the St. George Ribbon, the Candle of Memory) ^{[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]}. In this regard, it is not surprising that the memory of the war also continues to be considered by the political authorities as the most significant symbolic resource for the consolidation of Russian society. At the same time, acting as a symbolic framework for public perception of the events of the present, the memory of the war often finds itself at the forefront of the socio-political struggle, marking various political positions, as well as forms of social disagreement and public criticism. In this regard, a special role is being played by the space of Internet communications, where a low level of censorship allows you to express your opinions in a more free form regarding the current social, political, economic and cultural agenda. This fully applies to the study of the representation of mass historical consciousness. Modern researchers working in the field of memory studies have long noted the need to analyze almost any problem in this area in the context of the media environment ^[6], since both individual ^{[7, 8, 9]} and collective ^{[10, 11]} images of the past in the mass consciousness are formed, transmitted and even preserved through media communications ^{[12, 13, 14, 15]} (e.g. projects "Search for relatives of heroes of the Great Patriotic War", "Faces of Victory", "Databases of victims of political terror", etc.).

It is important to emphasize that the thesis about the media environment, and more broadly, the mediality of commemorative practices is not so much the position of individual domestic and foreign scientists, but points to deep transformations of the research field itself, the relationship of memory about the past, cultural images of time and the media environment. The fundamental problem in this case is that the media environment is becoming a condition of experience, consciousness, body and the surrounding world today. In this case, the media turn out to be not so much a subject as a condition of cognition, which actualizes the placement of the problematic of memory in the contexts of media philosophy ^[16]. Research undertaken within the framework of media philosophy is increasingly turning to the study of new forms of temporality and ontology of the past in media discourses ^[17]. Parallel to this research trend, there is a significant convergence of memory studies and media studies, which gave researchers reason to talk about the so-called "third wave" of memory studies. A few years ago, a foreign researcher Patrick Hutton proposed the following classification: "The first wave at the end of the XIX century was scientific and focused on the individual. At its center lay the psychological sphere. The second wave was formed by the end of the twentieth century . She was closer to the art of memory, but focused mainly on the social framework. Its main sphere of distribution was historiography. The third wave has been spreading since the beginning of the XXI century and focuses on the cultural consequences of media technologies. Communication studies are at its center" ^{[18, p. 177]}. Commenting on P. Hutton's theses, the Russian researcher Fedor Nicolai points out another important feature of modern memory studies: "Researchers are increasingly interested not in individual points ("places of memory"), but in the general topology of this space, its driving forces and dynamic effects that determine the growing proliferation of cultural practices and the change of modes of correlation of life experience and media-representations" ^{[19, p. 371]}.

In the light of these trends, the memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 also receives new perspectives of study, a separate place in which is occupied by the study of the peculiarities of perception of official commemorations of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in the regional Internet space. Such a research focus allows not only to see and rank the spectrum of opinions, but also to better understand the heterogeneity of the field of public commemorations around the memory of the war in modern Russia.

In modern conditions, it can be said that the memory of the war shows a tendency to fragmentation and transformation within the framework of individual regional strategies for addressing the past ^{[20, 21]}. This feature is due to both generational changes in modern Russian society and the wide spread of digital technologies, which determine the need for the formation of new ways of commemoration. At the same time, the stated trend requires further study in the context of specific regions and their Internet space. Accordingly, the purpose of this article was a comparative analysis of the peculiarities of perception of official memorials dedicated to the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the Internet space of two Russian regions: Tula and Tomsk regions. The sources for the analysis were comments from users of social networks, Internet blogs and news sites of the two regions in the period 2015-2021, dedicated to Victory Day (May 9), Memorial Day and Mourning (June 22), the Immortal Regiment campaign, topical regional commemorations of the Great Patriotic War, as well as mentions of individual pages of family memory and the events of the war heroes. The choice of these regions was related to their specifics in relation to the theme of the Great Patriotic War itself, where the Tomsk region was a rear region, and military operations were taking place on the territory of the Tula region. The choice of the lower chronological frame (2015) was due, firstly, to the activation of mass historical consciousness due to the "patriotic effect" of the Crimean events of 2014, and secondly, to the active spread in 2015 and subsequent years of the All-Russian campaign "Immortal Regiment". In this article, we will present the results of an analysis of user comments from two regions in the period 2015-2021. only in relation to Victory Day, the Immortal Regiment campaign and news mentions of individual pages of family memory and events of war heroes.  

Turning to the topic of the perception of the commemorations of the Great Patriotic War in the Internet space, it is important to understand that the analysis of news comments cannot adequately represent the general population of the regions represented, since it is a manifestation of the individual desire of the inhabitants of the regions to speak out about the historical events that interest us. At the same time, news comments, remaining on the pages of websites and news portals, turn out to be one of the sources of information for new users and a regional audience. This means that discourses that are formed in social networks and public news portals turn out to be one of the sources of constructing social reality in the media environment. It is this fact that makes them an important source for studying mass historical consciousness in Russia, allows us to better understand the specifics of the media environment as a factor in the transformation of mass historical consciousness.   

The research results presented in this article continue our previous projects. In 2017, we undertook a study of the peculiarities of the perception of Victory Day commemorations in the Russian Internet space ^[22]. We tried to show that in the conditions of the transition of the communicative memory of the war into the cultural memory (in the terminology of J. Assman), contradictory assessments of the historical event itself are intensified, which is used as a pretext for criticizing the current government. Based on the content analysis of Russian social networks, we have revealed that the Internet space fully reflects the main trend of Russian memorial culture in recent years: the gradual devaluation of historical meanings and the departure to particular versions of historical memory (family, local social group), as well as the polarization of mass historical consciousness.

In 2021, we continued to study the Russian regional Internet space for the specifics of the perception of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 commemorations. The large volume of comments, as well as the modern development of machine learning and Big Data analysis methods, made it possible to analyze the topic of interest to us in the focus of machine processing of comments and subsequent analysis of sentiments. One of the intermediate conclusions was the statement of the fact of the growth of negative comments on official commemorative practices dedicated to the Great Patriotic War in both the Tula and Tomsk regions in the period 2015-2021. We also revealed a lack of synchronicity in the growth of negative comments, which indicated just the tendency of fragmentation and transformation of perception of the past in the regional dimension ^[23]. At the same time, the conducted research showed the insufficiency of using quantitative methods and required supplementing them with qualitative methods of processing comments in order to identify semantic shades and interpretations of past events. In this regard, the methodology of discourse analysis, which has proven itself well in working with large arrays of texts of the media environment, and allows you to identify semantic blocks behind these arrays, analyze the functional orientation of the utterance, acquires certain prospects. One of the most developed models of critical discourse analysis is rightfully considered to be the methodology of Siegfried Yeager ^{[24, 25]}. Its popularity among sociologists and political scientists is indicated by the fact of its use by the Economic and Social Research Council, which for ten years (1996-2006) funded a project to study discourses in the UK press about refugees and asylum seekers ^{[24, p.15]}.

 As is known, Siegfried Yeager's methodology of critical discourse analysis was positioned by him as a direct application of Michel Foucault's ideas to the field of studying discursive practices on society. The German researcher was interested in how legitimate knowledge arises and what its functions are in the processes of constructing social relations. Siegfried Jaeger himself defined knowledge as "any forms of consciousness content, as well as meanings used by subjects to interpret the surrounding reality at a given historical time period" ^{[26, p. 33]}. The German theorist uses the definition of discourse given by Jurgen Link, noting that discourse is "an institutionally consolidated language that defines the structure of social actions and, thereby, influences the relations of power in society" ^{[26, p. 34]}. In this article we will not describe in detail the description of the scheme of the method of discourse analysis of Z. Yeager and F. Mayer, since it is well represented in the authors' publications themselves ^[26], and has also been repeatedly described and applied in the Russian scientific literature ^{[24, 25]}. We will only point out that the main task of this method is the analysis of typical text fragments (fragments of discourses), represented in a symbolic space and containing various types of references to the same topic. This common thread acts as a kind of discursive strand, which the German researcher defines as the sum of text fragments as fragments of discourse on one topic ^{[26, p.38]}. In our case, such a common theme turns out to be either mentions of May 9 or the "Immortal Regiment" campaign, or mentions of individual pages of family memory and events of war heroes.

From the entire array of comments analyzed with the help of computer analysis of sentiments, for our discourse analysis we selected one news (news about May 9, about the Immortal Regiment campaign, news about veterans, war heroes or family memory of them) for each year from at least three news portals Tula and Tomsk areas. Thus, we have selected a set of comments dedicated to the May 9 campaign "Immortal Regiment" or commemorations of veterans, heroes and individual families in the period from 2015 to 2021 (63 news reports with comments). We used news portals newtula.ru , myslo.ru , https://vk.com/tsn24.news (Tula region), as well as news portals https://news.vtomske.ru , https://www.tomsk.ru , https://www.tomsk.kp.ru (Tomsk region). Further, each set of comments devoted to one news report was analyzed within the framework of thematic (a general overview of comments, topics), structural analyses (the relationship of important topics within the corpus of statements, fixing the frequency of their mention, connection with other discourses, the structure of transmitted meanings, typical fragments of discourse), as well as rhetorical means (forms of argumentation, logic and composition, implications and insinuations, metaphors, symbols, pictures, idioms and cliches, vocabulary), context and ideological conclusions. A comparative analysis of the discursive threads over the past seven years within the framework of the designated three news agendas has revealed the main trends and transformation of the semantic content of comments on the news portals of the Tula and Tomsk regions.

Comparing the discursive threads devoted to news reports about the celebration of Victory Day in the Tula and Tomsk regions, one can point to the radicalization of comments that either turned out to be unequivocally critical of the official comments of the authorities, or were unequivocally apologetic to them. At the same time, the share of critical comments throughout the studied period dominated over apologetic ones, although the very grounds for criticism changed, which allows us to speak about the situativeness and, in most cases, the superficial nature of critical assessments. For example, critically assessing the official comments on May 9, the audience of news portals of the Tula region associated this criticism with a change in traffic (2015, 2019), then with the activation of the improvement of the city only for the May holidays (2018, 2021), then with bad weather and fatigue to watch annual television repeats of popular films and TV shows (2017). However, the analysis of the selected sets of comments from the Tomsk region did not reveal such discussions. As in the Tula region, here we also see the situational nature of statements and their inconsistency. In the case of the Tomsk region, the source of criticism was either the poor organization of the holiday (2015), or the dominance of representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Penitentiary Service at the parade (2016, 2019), or vice versa, the insufficiency of events in Tomsk in comparison with other Siberian cities (2017, 2018). Thus, festive events are used to a greater extent as a symbolic frame for criticizing other issues, very often unrelated to the event itself. A striking example was the following post, in a humorous form indicating the unresolved domestic and communal issues in the Tula region: "Our governor announced that the region is ready by May 9!!! To be honest, I completely agree with him! Front-line roads have been built, anti-tank pits are evenly distributed, defensive trenches are being dug along the sidewalks!!! The enemy will not pass!!!" (https://myslo.ru/news/tula/2018-04-27-v-tule-zavershaetsya-podgotovka-ko-dnyu-pobedy#comments ).

At the same time, despite the situational nature of the analyzed comments, one of the most popular topics of critical discussion in both areas for a number of years has been the topic of turning the memory of the Great Patriotic War into the main mouthpiece of the official memory policy. In this case, most of the criticisms are based on three main arguments: the dominance of official festive events over mourning and the memory of fallen veterans ("victory", "window dressing"), the spread of militaristic symbols through the popularization of weapons and military uniforms in preschool and school institutions (especially the popularization of the action "We can repeat!"), the need for to increase funding for veterans of the Great Patriotic War by reducing the cost of official events on May 9. These arguments point to a tendency to contrast the family memory of veterans and official commemorative events dedicated to Victory Day. In this case, we will cite a number of typical statements indicating this trend: "Why did you spend money on this show-off? It would be better to distribute this money to the participants of the war and pensioners!" (https://myslo.ru/news/tula/2020-04-27-tulyaki-vozmusheny-v-internet-magazinah-prodayut-mnogorazovye-maski-ko-dnyu-pobedy#comments) "Each of my grandfathers had his own war. One of my grandfathers reached Berlin and died of wounds and diseases in 1946, another grandfather, along with my grandmother and my father (still a young man) they spent the whole war in a concentration camp and survived. When my late father saw the slogan "We can repeat it" on modern cars, he asked: Are they offering me to repeat four years in a concentration camp?" (https://myslo.ru/news/tula/2020-04-27-tulyaki-vozmusheny-v-internet-magazinah-prodayut-mnogorazovye-maski-ko-dnyu-pobedy#comments). Criticism of the redundancy of the new commemorative actions on May 9 was especially evident in the unequivocally negative assessment by users of news reports about the proposal of deputies to introduce the title "City of Military Valor", which, according to the authors of the messages, significantly erodes the honorary titles "Hero City" and "City of Military Glory" (https://myslo.ru/news/tula/2015-05-25-tulskie-edinorossi-predlozhili-vvesti-zvanie-gorod-voinskoy-doblesti#comments).

The results of the discourse analysis of positive comments on Victory Day commemorations demonstrate either a general acceptance of all Victory Day commemorations and a statement of deep satisfaction with them, or they are connected by the presentation on networks and news sites of brief information about their own relatives-participants of the war as a symbol of unity with the official events of Victory Day. In this case, it is important to pay attention that the sacralization of older relatives – participants of the Great Patriotic War is one of the most important for the historical consciousness of our commentators, both when they oppose the memory of them to official events, and when they fully support the latter. Much less often we have come across comments linking the Victory Day commemorations with an unambiguously positive assessment of Russia's foreign and domestic policy, indicating the need to return the images of I.V. Stalin to the pantheon of heroes of the Great Patriotic War or indicating that only the red flag is a real symbol of Victory.

The comments of users of networks and news sites in both regions regarding the Immortal Regiment campaign look much less polarized. In this case, in relation to the Tula region, we have not found a stable negative trend. On the contrary, positive comments not only prevailed here, but in almost all cases were associated with the description of the fate of older relatives, the sacralization of whose lives and exploits turned out to be the main argument in disputes about the events of the war between users. In some cases, the sacralization of older relatives and the action as a whole acquired a distinctly poetic character (2015, 2017). Among the negative comments in relation to this news event, two main blocks can be distinguished. On the one hand, situational comments dominated, which linked criticism of the action with inadequate numbers of participants (2016), then with a discussion of the impropriety of mixing the "Immortal Regiment" with the comments of veterans of other wars (2018), then with the impropriety of holding the action in person during the pandemic (2020), then with criticism of the internal policy of the government (2021). The argumentation of most of these comments does not stand up to rational criticism and allows us to classify them as emotional reactions to the current information agenda. On the other hand, we have also identified a tendency to contrast the family memory of veterans and the official commemorations of the "Immortal Regiment". However, even in this case, the critical statements were aimed solely at using the action as an official event of domestic policy and did not affect the very need for the commemoration of war veterans.

A different situation with the comments of the action "Immortal Regiment" developed in the Tomsk region, where for all seven studied years (2015-2021) it was critical comments that dominated, mostly due to the fact that Tomsk was the place where this action originally arose, and then was "intercepted" by federal structures and turned into all-Russian official action. The main reproach in most comments is that, having received federal status, this action has lost its former "live" and "non-politicized" meaning: "The Immortal Regiment appeared as an alternative to the growing pomp and pathos of the holiday, which the new anti-people government in essence covered up its true face of the shark of capitalism. In the early years, they even tried to ban it, if anyone knows. But the number of participants was increasing and the top wisely decided not to interfere, but even to sit down again. State employees caught up" (https://news.vtomske.ru/news/163298-bolee-25-tysyach-chelovek-proshli-v-stroyu-bessmertnogo-polka-v-tomske). It can also be stated that in this case, discussions of the specifics of the "Immortal Regiment" campaign also turn out to be a kind of symbolic framework for criticizing the internal policy of the current government. At the same time, as in the case of the Tula region, the figure of the veteran and older relatives were sacralized.

The third block of our analysis in this article was a discourse analysis of aggregates of comments related to news reports about individual veterans, war heroes or family memory of older relatives. On the one hand, not a single negative response was found in both areas regarding the placement of this information. Moreover, as in previous cases, we have recorded a tendency to sacralize veterans and older relatives, actively posting their photos and photos of their personal belongings. It is important that the responses to the comments were also positive and were rather clarifications and clarifications about the life and war years of older relatives who participated in the war. The leitmotif of most of the responses in the networks was admiration for the feat of individuals and the generation of veterans as a whole. Even the rather popular topic of criticism of the authorities through the prism of military events and the fate of individuals in this case was practically not noticeable. In relation to the Tula region, a trend of public demand for increased information about local war heroes and veterans was also revealed. It is characteristic that, discussing the stories of fellow countrymen who participated in the war, network users in almost all cases mentioned their older relatives. More criticism was demonstrated by comments on news portals of the Tomsk region, where a significant number of critical comments were related to the topic of late financial payments of the authorities to veterans ("they caught on late"). It is curious in this regard that the two news of 2020 related to payments to veterans and the organization of a contest of family pictures and letters demonstrated the absolute majority of negative comments. In the first case, it was about the need to support veterans throughout the year (https://news.vtomske.ru/news/170954-veteranam-voiny-k-75-letiyu-pobedy-vyplatyat-po-75-tys-rub ), and in the second case, the discussion unfolded regarding the impropriety of the logic of the contest itself and the presentation of family letters, as well as giving the war a romanticized appearance (https://news.vtomske.ru/news/172028-tomichei-priglashayut-pouchastvovat-v-konkurse-semeinyh-snimkov-i-pisem-vremen-vov).

An important point that drew attention to itself was the increase in the number of audio, video, photo images and collages to illustrate the topics discussed, related both to the Victory Day commemorations, the Immortal Regiment campaign, as well as to the discussion of pages of the life history of veterans. The audio-visual fragments or photographs posted were intended to enhance the apologetic or critical effect of the statements. For example, critically discussing the official events of the Immortal Regiment campaign, one of the users of the news feed posted a video clip with the answers of a Tula schoolgirl taking part in the action and having no idea about the person depicted on her plate (https://myslo.ru/news/tula/2016-05-09-glas-naroda-tulyaki-pro-den-pobedi#comments ). At the same time, the number of audio, video and photo documents posted in news feeds was not significant in comparison with the comment texts and was considered by us only as an auxiliary source.

Thus, despite the fact that sociological surveys of recent years show the preservation of the memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 as the most important historical event and ideological reference point in the mass historical consciousness, the study of the perception of the war memorials on the Internet shows a further increase in the devaluation of the historical meanings of the Russian memorial culture and the departure to particular versions of historical memory (family, local group). Within the framework of our research, the thesis about the preservation of the polarization of mass historical consciousness in the regional Internet space was confirmed, and the tendency of fragmentation and transformation of the perception of the past in the regional dimension was revealed. Application of the methodology of critical discourse analysis of Z. Yeager's approach to aggregates of text fragments made it possible to refine the trends outlined above. Firstly, it was revealed that the initiatives of the authorities to create a special variant of civil religion based on the sacralization of the events of the Great Patriotic War are faced, on the one hand, with the counter sacralization of war heroes, veterans and family memory of them in the mass consciousness, and on the other hand, with the increasing opposition of family commemorations of Victory Day and official events and shares of the authorities. Secondly, in both areas, the fact of using the discussion of the May 9 commemorations and the Immortal Regiment campaign as a symbolic framework for criticizing the domestic and foreign policies of the current government was recorded. At the same time, most of the critical comments are situational in nature and are related to topical regional socio-economic problems. The results of the discourse analysis of positive comments on Victory Day commemorations demonstrate either a general acceptance of all Victory Day commemorations and a statement of deep satisfaction with them, or they are connected by the presentation on networks and news sites of brief information about their own relatives-participants of the war as a symbol of unity with the official events of Victory Day. Thirdly, the analyzed sets of text fragments do not contain references to scientific facts or aspirations to use historical sources to assess certain events of the war. The argumentation of these text messages does not represent a consistent position, demonstrating the extremely emotional appearance of the statements. Nevertheless, the analysis of a sample set of text fragments of comments from netizens confirms the fact of the growth of negative comments on official commemorations of the Great Patriotic War, which we previously identified using quantitative methods, indicating a blurring of the ideological framework of public perception of this historical event.