REHABILITATING MAURICE HALBWACHS: MEMORY AS A GENERATIONAL COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGY

At the beginning of the 21st century the Russian Federation witnessed a number of academic events, academic forums and books, which dealt with questions of generation, collective memory and generation as a community of remembrance. This article sees some of these events as a starting point for sketchy refl ections on the possible applications and limitations of the term ‘generation’ in historical research. The authors pose the following questions: How does the generation problem in social reality and in historical scholarship relate to phases of crisis and transition in social development? Is there a connection between generation and memory? Which methodological approaches can be used to eff ectively trace this connection? Such problems have been widely explored in studies at the turn of 20th-21st centuries, drawing on material from recent sociological surveys. Therefore, the answers to them may be particularly valuable for those who study the memory of the generations of the dramatic 1990s. Answering these questions and following some of the panellists of the 2000s and 2010s, the authors conclude that an eff ective investigation of the relation between generation and memory inevitably leads to a revision of Jan Assmann’s views and a rehabilitation of Maurice Halbwachs’ starting points. The article does not interpret a generation essentialistically, but constructivistically: not as an ‘objective’ quantity, as a set of people who belong to a certain age group or historical epoch, but as a subjective social construction. Each generation, as a perceived community of collective illusions and idealisations lived by its members, stands opposite others and exists only in connection with others. The main thesis of the article is that generation can be a useful concept to shed light on the dynamics of images of the past, as these images are an important part of communicative eff orts to form a generational community. If we understand generation as a cultural construct and a communicative event, we can even claim that communication about the past is the most important prerequisite for maintaining the integrity of a generational group.