SOVIET/POST-SOVIET LITERATURE AS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR CONFIRM-ING THE TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL RELIGION OF ANTI-VESTERNISM

Abstract

The article concerns a topical issue both in theoretical and in worldview and cultural sense. It concerns one of the foundations of the political religion of imperial Russia, connected with the current Russian-Ukrainian war as a war against the “Collective West”. The author of the article uses the concept of “political religion” developed in world theoretical thought to describe and study the practice of creating Soviet and post-Soviet totalitarian ideology and mythology. The author’s attention is focused on literature as an effective tool for creating such mythology, which in many cases could be incompatible with the apparent slogans of “internationalism”, “humanism” and “Slavic brotherhood”, not to mention the undeniable, documented historical facts
At the beginning of the article, the main aspects of the concept of “political religion” are outlined. The author believes that the strength of the concepts of political religion is, first of all, that they connect the latter with totalitarianism, with its socio-political and cultural practice, ideology and mythology. In general, political religion describes the ways of organizing a totalitarian society. At the same time, a specific culture integrated into political religion, not least literature, which serves “under the banner of the party”, acts as a means of formatting mass consciousness and subconsciousness..
The author turns to a number of significant works of Russian Soviet and post-Soviet literature, written from the mid-20th century to the first decades of the 21st century. These works vividly illustrate anti-Westernism as the semantic axis of the Russian imperial-totalitarian political religion. At the same time, attempts by some writers after the 20th Congress of the CPSU to go beyond the boundaries of this religion, even from the position of “authentic Marxism”, were subjected to harsh criticism and repression, even when it was not a question of political opposition, but of elementary honesty and objectivity.
The article shows the continuity of the guidelines of the Russian political religion of the late Stalin’s times and the present, emphasizes the use of such a popular literary direction among young people as science fiction of different years of writing and of different genres, outlines the specifics of the military memoirs of the Soviet era and modern "military-historical studies", analyzes works dedicated to the "replaying of history" with the apology of the aggressive expansionism of the USSR/Russia.