The 1990s is a controversial period of the Russian history. On the one hand, it was the time of the freedom of speech and development of private business. On the other hand, this period is often associated with the narrative of the "likhie devianostye" (the hard nineteen-nineties) that portrays this period as a decade political instability, poverty and high level of criminality and corruption. Since the beginning of 2000s, the negative myth of "hard 1990s" became a dominant construction in Russian symbolic policy, commonly supported and equally shared by ordinary people and the government. This element has an important role for the support of the political regime, because it prevents changes and attempts to reform the political system (Malinova, 2019),. On the one hand, this myth legitimizes status quo for government officials. On the other hand, it is a serious obstacle for the development of the political system. Now this controversial myth faces serious challenges: twenty years has already passed since the end of 1990s and the previous generation of people has gone. This is a very important time period for collective memory: after this time generations may start to analyze their experience of the recent years, rethink historical events, its reasons and consequences and construct practices delegitimating political regime. At this moment the commemoration practices of 1990s are insufficiently researched. Due to the fact that myth of "hard nineties" is a significant construction for legitimation of the current political regime (Malinova, 2019), the challenging practices became interesting object of analysis.
This paper examines the commemorative practices of Russian symbolic politics in relation to the 1990s. In this study, I am going to analyze films and TV series about the 1990s as practices of symbolic policy that can form a positive, neutral or negative image of the historical period. Analysis of films as practices shaping collective memory is reasoned by set of theorists in the fields of memory studies and cinema studies (Godfrey, Lilley, 2009; Schroeder, 1998; Kaplan, 2008, Baudrillard, 1981, Foucault, 1996). For this study, I selected the most popular films and TV series about the 1990s, filmed from the 1990s to 2020. I assume that films of the early 2000s will contain an official negative narrative. In turn films and TV series of 2015-2020 will contain positive and neutral representations of the 1990s.
