The Everyday Life of a Ural Higher Educational Institution in the Epoch of Changes (Second Half of the 1980s–1990s): Oral History View

Abstract

The growth of interest and need to comprehend the processes that took place in Russian society in the last decades of the 20th century is largely due to the desire to understand the current socio-political situation. Frequently enough, researchers of various fields of knowledge see the origins of today’s Russia in the 1990s. Is it time to carry out historical analysis of the period? Most likely, answers to this question will differ, i.e. while professional historians find it important to consider historical events from a long distance as a key to a proper understanding of laws in the development of any era, the historical curricula of higher educational institutions are full of disciplines devoted to the study of the “collapse of the socialist system”. However, there is no doubt in academia that it is urgent to identify, collect, and accumulate sources reflecting various aspects of the history of the 1990s. In this regard, it seems promising to turn to the practice of oral historical interviewing. In the context of the development of the anthropological approach, oral history can be defined as one of the most socially significant areas of historical knowledge. The author aims to use the oral history method to identify the views and evaluation characteristics of lecturers of the Faculty of History, Ural Federal University on the events of the perestroika period and the first post-Soviet decade. The actualisation in the work of the comparative approach is explained by the fact that in the memories of most respondents, the 1990s are most often accompanied by the events of the previous important historical stage, i.e. perestroika.

Keywords

• «перестройка»
• 1990-е гг.
• высшая школа
• устное интервью
• социальная история.