SUMMARY:

The article focuses on the structure and functionality of visual content in new forms of mass media in post-Soviet Russia. The visual culture of post-Soviet society is studied in its relation to the socialist school visual subculture of the previous period. Soviet (and thus post-Soviet) mass consciousness was formed through specific emblematic media, e.g., the school textbook. This mnemonic and persuasive tool had all-Union general application and is responsible for the specific configuration of collective emblematic memory of several generations. The article is aimed at following literally “visual traces” of this school’s classical material in a new media environment.
Mass visual culture in the former Soviet space, of course, has been subjected to dramatic changes. First, the most striking difference is that the main part of visual ideological propaganda has been replaced with commercial (or pseudo-commercial) advertisements. And second, completely new forms of mass communicative (but also figurative) culture have appeared, e.g., the Internet. The Internet has gained major importance among the most active strata (young intellectuals, “the children of 70s”) during the last 10 years and can be considered an extremely dynamic experimental field generating new forms of mentality, communication, representation, and languages. It is also remarkable that the Internet connects Russian-speaking “former Soviet people” all over the world, which makes it in a paradoxical way a kind of replacement for the USSR. This new “Union” lives according to new laws and speaks new forms of language, but still, old propaganda patterns and motives can be discovered even there. These forms are considered as a new kind of folklore discourse.