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Abstract. The article considers 1989 as the peak of the collective trauma caused by the sharp loss of national and ideological identity by the late Soviet society and reveals the role of the First Congress of People’s Deputies in this process. Based on the approaches of studying intellectual history and historical memory, the author provides a retrospective analysis of the memoirs of politicians in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article provides an overview of the approaches to study of perestroika, as well as changes in the Soviet political and economic systems in the period under review. Statistical data are used to identify the development of ideas about 1989 as a milestone date of the newest Soviet history in the mass public consciousness. The author addresses such aspects of analysis as the legitimacy/completeness of statements about the existence of the Soviet empire, the role of the CPSU leadership in raising public awareness, and the factor of regional and shadow economy in the development of the statehood disintegration. The author concludes that overcoming the collective trauma is of a cyclical nature connected with the search for a new identity, and is determined by the traditions formed in the first half of the XX century. The crisis of the socialist idea at the turn of the 1980–1990s contributed to the initiative to preserve it enforced by the CPSU leaders, which, in turn, contributed to a decrease of party discipline and ideological control, and, as a result, led to weakening influence of the CPSU on the socio-political life in the country, and eventually to the crisis of the Soviet and wider socialist political system.
Keywords: USSR, perestroika, CPSU, 1989, Soviet Empire, I Congress of people’s deputies, collective trauma, power and society, identity, collective memory, paradox of institutionalized nostalgia.