Щит і меч Штірліца: рецепція силових структур й ґенеза російсько-української війни в контексті радянської і пострадянської памʼяті

The article examines the influence of cultural memory, in particular book culture and the image of Soviet security forces recorded in it, on the Soviet and post-Soviet memory of Russians and Ukrainians in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It is analyzed how the motives and ideology of the 2022 war were born within the Soviet and post-Soviet culture. and traced how they penetrated the territory of Ukraine and how the speakers of Russian and Ukrainian cultures reacted to it. It is considered how the image of «valiant fighters of the invisible front» was formed, how it spread to all employees of the Soviet special services (Cheka, NKVD, OGPU, GPU, Ministry of Internal Affairs – KGB, GRU). It was studied how he interacted with the images of soldiers, commanders of the Soviet Army and representatives of the Soviet militia. The ways of evolution of this image in the cultural and historical memory of the Soviet Union and its republics, in particular Soviet Russia and Ukraine, are emphasized. Various ways and forms of infiltration of the «chekist», «militia», «military» paradigm of Soviet culture in the Ukrainian and Russian space have been studied. It is indicated how and which cultural products shaped the images of communist heroes: from works and films about Stirlitz to spy novels by Bulgarian, Polish, and Czech socialist authors. There were also their Ukrainian counterparts. It is emphasized that one of the main niches in the Ukrainian Soviet context was played by anti-insurgency literature, which formed a positive image of «heroic» representatives of the Soviet special services/military/policemen and negative images of the anti-Soviet undergrounds. It is noted that a separate block of ideological literature that militarized the consciousness of Soviet readers were books dedicated to the Soviet and Russian army. They also formed a negative image of the «dangerous imperialist West» and «valiant communist armed forces». It was noted that in the post-Soviet period, the paths of historical and cultural memory diverged in the mentioned topic, but Soviet historical mythology continued to operate in the post-Soviet cultural space. It has been proven that the reactivation of Soviet ideas about wars in the Russian collective consciousness of the first decades of the 21st century became one of the pretexts for the Russian-Ukrainian war.