Patriotic Song of Yesterday and Today: Collective Memory and the Search for Common Symbols

Abstract. The article deals with a phenomenon of modern popular culture – a patriotic song, which obviously is experiencing a revival today. In the era of the collapse of the statehood of the USSR, the Soviet patriotic song, an important means of propaganda and education of patriotism, actually ceased to exist, since the semantic core that it broadcast to the masses disappeared. The place of these songs in the field of cultural production began to be filled by other musical genres, to some extent perceived by society as tools for the formation (or restoration) of a new collective identity to replace the lost Soviet one. The search for a new object of patriotism for the sake of self-identification, the need for which became vaguely realized after overcoming the "shock of the nineties" and which over the past decade and a half has found more and more forms of expression, has led to the formation of a post-Soviet conventionally patriotic venue of mass culture, devoid of the “official romantics” of the Soviet period and reflecting the ripening grain of a renewed collective civic identity, where sincere and zealous service to Russia is recognized as the most significant fact. On the modern music scene, one of the representatives of this venue is the Radio Tapok project, which has grown from the performance of cover versions of songs of foreign rock bands in Russian into an independent creative team and actively develops patriotic themes in its original albums, with a warm welcome from the public.

Keywords: popular culture, patriotic song, collective identity, symbolic politics, historical memory, Russian history.