The Discourse of the State Memory Politics as a Factor in the Formation of the National Identity of Modern Russia

The article explores the ways of interrelation and mutual influence of two discursive constructs – the discourse of memory politics and the discourse of identity politics, considered in relation to modern Russian realities. The relevance of the research is due to the high interest of government representatives and the Russian scientific community in this issue along with the tasks of studying the structural components of these discursive formations, in particular, value-based and symbolic ones. In the official discourse, special attention is paid to the question of which values should form the internal structure of the Russian national identity. Currently, the main approaches to the representation of the basic traditional values have been revealed, which has found conceptual coverage in a number of official political sources. While analyzing the works of Russian political scientists on the ways of interrelation of identity politics with memory politics, it was concluded that for most researchers, the state memory politics is just a contextual element of a more extensive concept, which is the discourse of national identity. Only in one of the works, it was possible to find a number of concepts explaining how the discourse of memory politics forms the constituent components of the discourse of national identity. The article presents the author’s definition of the state memory politics, which theoretically bridges understanding the mechanisms of the relationship between the memory politics and the politics of national identity. Symbolic images of the Great Victory and their value content are considered. In the final part of the study, the main theoretical and methodological tasks are specified, since their successful solution defines the constructive development of the issue.