The “gloomy past” of St. Petersburg workers in the symbolic space of Leningrad in the 1920s

Abstract

The article examines the experience of Soviet propaganda to the history of everyday life by creation a negative memory of the past life of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg workers. Having studied the scientific and agitation discourse, the authors came to the conclusion that the pictures of the daily life of workers during the tsarist period were an integral part of the formation of the binary opposition “then” - “now”, which implied the maximum discrediting of the pre-revolutionary past in the eyes of the population.