Historical narratives and war representations in the collective memory of Runet communities: Temporal trajectories and semantic networks

The article analyses the collective representation of war narratives in the Russian social network VKontakte in the context of the problems of national self-consciousness and national identity. The material for the study was extracted by automated methods using the VKontakte open API. It amounts to 332,781 unique posts from open historical communities from January 1, 2020 to May 9, 2022. Using the PolyAnalyst platform, the authors found out that the word “war” is the most frequent and most significant (the metric takes into account the average frequency of a word in all texts) in this text collection. A sample of texts with the word “war” (49,736 posts) was subjected to additional analysis with a set of NLP methods to study key narratives and semantic connections. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the principles and approaches of modern narratology and the history of memory. The analysis of social media big data has confirmed that the dramatic historical fate of Russia, as a natural consequence of the factors of vast territory, extended borders, and abundance of natural resources, has shaped the mentality of Russians to be always ready for war. Thematic clustering of texts has confirmed the dominance of the practices of commemoration of the Great Patriotic War, reflected the etatism and etacratism of the Russian consciousness, demonstrated public attention to representations of war in art and science, and discovered the “trench truth” block and its place in the collective war representations. Narratives are often rich in details and facts, pragmatism, prosaic and rationalism. Empirical material confirms that the 20th century certainly occupies a special significance in the memory of Russians about wars. The authors comment on the rating of references to wars in the studied text collection and indicate the opposition of the Great Patriotic War to the Second World War, and the Patriotic War of 1812 to the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. Some attention is also given to the issues of information wars in the modern world. The presented war narrative is of interest as the foundation of the “collective imaginary”, on the basis of which the prospects and critical boundaries of the image of the future are constructed.