It’s about practices of everyday life engendered or shaped around things and objects that serve to be key points for memorialization of the world of so called «homo sovieticus» which in reality was so different from that created and promoted by the soviet propaganda. However, this paper is not just about consumption mechanisms or ethnographic interpretation of material objects in the system of soviet culture. objects utilized in our everyday life like clothes, food, furniture, personal car, books, etc. Essays’ content is focused on things, i.e. In fact, my own memories shared with other people are legitimized by others through their comments thus being turned into collective memory. Following Maurice Halbwachs’ idea, a man usually has to resort to memories of other people in order to recall his own past. These comments have shaped a discoursive field representing an artificially generated and textualized collective memory on soviet times. The paper also includes my comments on readers' comments placed in my Life Journal pages. The publication intended to attract comments of potential readers (about 150, mostly Armenians from Soviet Armenia or other post-soviet space). The core part of it has been written in a form of free-style essays representing my own memories and memories of people in my circle and initially published in one of the Internet social networks, the Life Journal. Thirdly, the paper is representing a kind of research experiment.
Secondly, I am trying to reveal and highlight the gap in the Armenian Museums of History and Ethnography that have included the soviet period of the Armenian History and Culture in their expositions. In the meantime, most of phenomena of current socio-cultural situation cannot be understood if not embedded into the previous soviet context. Firstly, it is an attempt to initiate studies of every day culture of Soviet Armenia, which seems to be completely and unfairly ignored by Armenian social researchers. Summary Memories of the Past: things in a system of the Armenian Soviet Culture The paper is pursuing multiple goals.
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