5th anniversary of the Patriotic war of 1812. Practices of commemoration

Abstract

This article examines the commemoration practices in marking 5th anniversary of the Patriotic war of 1812. Those celebrations became actually the first commemorative event dedicated to that war. A historical analysis is based on the material of mass media and memoirs of contemporaries. The focal point of the article is the collective memory formation process: what ceremonies were carried out and what goals were pursued by the state, what were the narratives of historical memory that existed in the press. The study of historical memory and its formation means, and specifically with regard to the anniversaries of the Patriotic war of 1812, has become widely prevalent in modern Russian historiography. However, historians rarely focus their attention on the 5th jubilee of the war. The study of that event from the point of view of the memorial history problematic will reveal not only the emerging of the narratives of historical memory, but also will be the starting point in the further study of their evolution and changes. The study of that dynamics is extremely important, because using the memory of the Patriotic war of 1812 has contributed to forming the national identity and self-consciousness of the Russian population over the past two centuries.