Collective memory of the Soviet past on YouTube: techniques for audiovisual construction by ordinary video bloggers

The YouTube platform hosts a multitude of video clips that contain various media representations of the collective memory of Soviet history. In this array of multimedia products, videos created by ordinary bloggers take their own place. Videos with themes about the recent Past are formed on the basis of digitized fragments of documentary and fiction films, photographs, posters, postcards, drawings, etc. Verbal comments of viewers-users to videos expand and change their semantic content. The purpose of the article is to reveal in the videos of ordinary bloggers various techniques for audiovisual constructing the collective memory of the mass repression of the 1930s and the Gulag. The criteria for selecting sources for the study are: the time they were posted on the YouTube platform (2010s), video bloggers claim to be documentary, the number of comments. The research results demonstrate that bloggers shape clusters of collective memory of the repressions and the Gulag using audiovisual signs and symbols that are easily recognizable by viewers. The same photographs and film fragments can “work” in video differently depending on how they relate to the verbal and audio components of multimodal text. The techniques used by bloggers for audiovisual documentation of the Soviet Past combine pre-digital and digital technologies. The selection of certain audiovisual components as “raw data” for video, their montage, giving historical figures certain roles, organizing time and space in a digital narrative, including different social and political contexts in it, all allow bloggers to form various representations of the collective memory of the Soviet past, depending on their ideological positions.

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