Reviving the national idea: ideology of the anti-bolshevik movement in Eastern Russia in institutional, discursive and commemorative dimensions

The recent 100th anniversaries of the Russian Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War have shown an urgent need for the formation of a holistic scientific understanding of this historical era, the expansion of the research field, and the emergence of new aspects, including the research of the Russian anti-Bolshevik's political history. The ideology of the anti-Bolshevik movement is a special symbolic universe, an integral socio-cultural sign system, a historically established explanatory model that gives meaning to the collective actions of its supporters. It was this ideology that predetermined and set out the direction of the internal and foreign policies of the state formations of the Russian White East. At present, the anti-Bolshevik movement's ideology continues to influence modern Russian society through the tools of historical memory. The purpose is to present and substantiate a new approach to the research of the anti-Bolshevik movement's in the east of Russia, combining the reconstruction of the content, forms and practices of its representation, characteristic directly of the period of the Civil War (1918-1920), as well as identifying the features of its further construction and transformation into a historical memory component and identity discourses in Russian society in the first decades of the 21st century. The author pays attention to an important circumstance: the ideology and propaganda of the anti-Bolshevik movement in some cases turned out to be surprisingly helpless and ineffective, in others - quite effective. The White Army lost when an attractive and viable social project was required, and won when the value, symbolic and aesthetic components of their ideology came to the fore, when the ideology-program was replaced by the ideology-myth. The author concludes that currently the most promising is the unification of two thematic fields - "ideology" and "memory" in one study. Firstly, it makes a possible to overcome the traditional structural and functional understanding of the anti-Bolshevik movement's ideology, considering it as a dynamically developing system. Secondly, it allows us to trace stable models, rhetorical strategies, and repetitive argumentation schemes used to position the anti-Bolshevik movement in different historical and sociocultural contexts. Thirdly, it helps to clarify the specifics of the discursive construction of imaginary communities in relation to a specific historical situation, to identify and provide a comprehensive assessment of the tools and mechanisms for the incorporation of ideological constructs into the practice and trajectory of the regional memory formation.

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