Everyday Life Knowledge of the Past on Russian Historical Internet Forums (2004–2020)

In this thesis, I attempt to study the public use of history at the micro level: among users of historical Internet forums. This approach allows one to get acquainted not with big state narratives about history, but with a personal understanding of historical problems among people. In historical science, there is now a certain trend towards interdisciplinary study of people’s interaction with history. My work involves not just retelling how people discuss history, but a detailed analysis of the discourses and language games that are used in Internet forums during the period 2004-2020. As research methods, the approaches developed by public history and memory studies are used to analyze the interaction of a person with history. As a discourse analysis, the approach of J.-F. Lyotard, who describes the state of postmodernism as a crisis of big narratives.