The topic of “victims of the 1990s” as one of the main elements of an oral narrative about the era

Abstract

The article is based on the data of the author’s study of the collective memory of Moscow residents about the 1990s, conducted in 2023–2024 using forty-five in-depth interviews, the purpose of which was to describe and analyze the mechanisms of construction and functioning of the oral narrative about the 1990s in Russia. One of the most important identified patterns is that in almost every oral narrative about the 1990s, a special place is given to the figures of people who, in the informant’s opinion, suffered the most from the social changes of the era. Because of that our informants may devalue their personal experience; in such cases the image of the life of the “real” victims of the era (always representing some external community in relation to informants and their environment, which does not allow them to identify themselves with them), invariably positioned as typical of the 1990s, comes to the forefront. The reason for this phenomenon is probably the semantic load of the image of the Russian nineties created by the media, referring to a set of conventions associated with it and ensuring a gradual shift in the vector of conversation from the informant’s memories of his personal life to a description of the conventionally typical experience of life of the era.