Transforming ideas about death and immortality in the Soviet culture of the 1920s and 1930s: symbolic models, ritual forms, and practices of collective memory

Abstract

The article examines the diversified transformation of ideas about death and immortality in Soviet culture during the 1920s and 1930s associated with the emergence of new symbolic models, secular rituals, and sustainable practices of collective memory. These developments arose at the intersection of ideological atheism, non-ecclesiastical ideas about human nature, posi tivist orientations, and mythopoeic structures in mass consciousness. The analysis of scholarly papers on obituary discourse, memorial policy, and mechanisms of sacralization of revolutionary victims reveals key elements of the Soviet thanatological paradigm. This paradigm interpreted death as a socially significant act that offers the possibility of symbolic immortality through in clusion in the pantheon of heroes and public display of their images. The focus was made on the relationship between political ritualism, visual representations, and institutional norms, which formed normative models of experiencing mortality. The obtained results allow clarifying the cultural and anthropological foundations of the Soviet immortality project and show that the early Soviet culture organized the interaction between the living and the dead as part of the historical movement towards a utopian future. The generalization of the presented data forms a basis for further research into the mechanisms of death transformation in the context of ideologically-oriented cultural systems.