“Unbreakable friendship of the Soviet people”: creation, existence and deconstruction of one Soviet myth

Abstract

The article investigates one of the basic Soviet myths – “Unbreakable friendship of the Soviet people”. The forms of expression of this ideological construction are described. The image of “the elder brother”, which was understood as the Russian people, is investigated. The article reveals the foundations of the inviolability of friendship of the Soviet peoples, which is interpreted as one of the main achievements of Soviet power.

The studied ideological structure was difficult to combine with the reality of the Soviet era. Cultural, confessional and locally civilizational differences of different segments of Soviet society persisted and resisted the integrating influence of the state. All the peoples of the USSR experienced modernization, but, contrary to the hopes of politicians and ideologists, the processes of rapprochement did not provide a merger. The Soviet ideology could not provide integration, and under a layer of the state promotion, processes of differentiation and national formation were developed. The crisis of Soviet society sharply marked the cultural and geopolitical orientations of different peoples of the USSR. The era of Perestroika, the collapse of the USSR and the post-Soviet reality revealed the fictitious nature of the myth of the “unbreakable friendship of the Soviet people.” Today, “unbreakable friendship” is a material for the study of complex dialectics of ideological attitudes of an ideocratic society and objective socio-cultural processes developing in this society.