Methodological problems of reconstructing the image of an officer in the minds of the Russian public at the beginning of the 20th century

The purpose of the article is to identify the institutions for the formation and translation of the officer's images in the minds of the Russian public at the beginning of the 20th century. Achievement of the set goal includes the following tasks: to determine the content of the category “image”, to identify the sources of the formation of various images of the officer in the early 20th century, to determine the role of the periodical in the design and translation of a particular image, to characterize the area of the image. This work is of a theoretical and methodological character. The methodological base of the presented research is discourse analysis. With that we mean a special way of communication and understanding of the social world. The use of discourse analysis gave an opportunity to recreate the main characteristics and assessments of the activities of representatives of the officer corps at the beginning of the 20th century. The source base of the research consists of the materials of the Russian journalism published on the pages of different periodicals such as: “Russian Herald”, “Education”, “The World of God”, etc. In the course of the study, the authors came to the conclusion that at present the “image of the past” plays the role of a kind of intellectual construct, which consists of different components. The image of an officer in the minds of the Russian public is a kind of abstract symbolic model of historical reality. Its formation was influenced by personal and social knowledge. It was found that the experience of personal interaction was not always positive. This contributed to the formation of a negative image of an officer in the minds of the Russian public. In general, officers were considered as the main opponents of democratic transformations in society. The authors believe that the periodical press on the one hand played the role of one of the main mechanisms for the translation of various images of military commanders in the early 20th century, and on the other hand it acted as one of the sources of the formation of public representations about officers. Analysis of the materials of domestic periodicals showed that at the beginning of the 20th century, there were various characteristics and assessments of the behavior of officers in service and in everyday life. Based on this, the authors came to the conclusion that there were different images of the officer in the public views at the beginning of the 20th century.

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