The increase in the influence/"power" of symbolic structures of political memory, the aggravating risks of identity conflicts in internal and foreign policy are intensifying by new means of contemporary political communications. These processes in the social construction of national identity warrant a comparative study of the symbolic figures in the national memory of Germany and Russia.
The study is based on theoretical approaches to the analysis of the "drama" of social memory by Jeffrey Alexander, Jeffrey Olick, René Girard, Bernhard Giesen, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann while studying the process of the social construction of symbolic boundaries and legitimation profiles of national memory in the research focus of the role (in this process) of the "substitute discourse"/symbolic violence, represented in the ambivalent semantics of "heroic" and "perpetrating". The concept of the globalisation risks for the legitimation of national memory by Ulrich Beck and Manuel Castells and the growing role of the symbolic content of populist discourses in contemporary political communications in the papers of such authors as Rogers Brubaker, Benedict Anderson, Cas Mudde, Benjamin De Cleen, Andrey Medushevsky, Olga Malinova, Alexey Miller are also significant for the study.
The main premise of the research is that the socio-cultural specifics of the national memory of contemporary Germany and Russia is related to the transformation of the "substitute violence" discourse under the influence of populist narratives and leads to a change in symbolic representations of the figures: "hero" and "perpetrator", "victim" and "witness", "winner" and "defeated" in legitimation profiles. This change is caused by the ideological position in Germany in relation to the events of World War II, the division and reunification of Germany, and in Russia in relation to "perestroika" and the traumatic collapse of the Soviet Union. The identity crisis caused by this is accompanied by attempts of political and mnemonic actors of contemporary Germany and Russia to justify the need for new symbolic configurations of "substitute violence" and is expressed in the growing conflict potential of society.
Communication processes on the European continent and in the world are highly dependent on the cultural directions of the symbolic structures in the national memory of Germany and Russia, which are significant geopolitical actors in the process of stabilisation/destabilisation of the socio-political order in the Eurasian space. It actualises socio-political studies of the evolution of the national memory in contemporary Germany and Russia in the context of the growing symbolic activity in the narratives of populist movements.
Keywords: national memory, populism, political culture, cultural sociology, narratives of national memory, legitimation profiles of national memory, symbolic politics in Germany, symbolic politics in Russia, symbolic figures, national identity, social movements, populist narratives
