“Burnt by the sun”: Gennadiy Vasilyevich Zadykhin and the narrative on nomenclature people of the late soviet epoch

Abstract

Background. Nowadays in searching ideological foundations of society and ap-peals in this regard to Soviet ideology, the study of the party vocabulary of the of the CPSU fanile stage history is of undoubted scientific interest and is an urgent topic that allows a critical approach to the phenomena of the past and creatively rework everything that was created important and valuable. Materials and methods. The research uses elements of dis-course analysis, semiotic methods necessary to identify texts of behavior, as well as theoret-ical developments of the “history of everyday life” concerning the identification of tactics and strategies of everyday life of actors of the historical process. The discourse of the Soviet party functionary of the late Soviet era is analyzed on the basis of party documentation. In the relatively prosperous Brezhnev era in terms of foreign policy factors and internal devel-opment, the process of forming the Soviet nomenclature reaches its apogee. The factors of vivid empathic emotions of the generation of the first Bolsheviks, the creators of the eco-nomic power of the Soviet country of the 20s–30s of the twentieth century, the heroic era of the Great Patriotic War, the post-war restoration of the economic potential of the USSR are disappearing. The final period of the Soviet Union development (1960–1980s) is character-ized by such features as the creative activity of the people in the economic sphere, and a kind of “stagnation” in the upper echelons of power structures and ideology. In the same years, the formation of the “cultural code” of the Soviet nomenclature was completed. In this regard, the study of the content of the reports of a provincial party functionary, preserved in the party and Soviet records management, is of undoubted interest and is an urgent topic in the light of modern attempts to revive some structural social elements of that era and nostalgia for the ideology cementing society, which was broadcast by regional leaders of the Communist Party. Results. The biography of a provincial party functionary provides an opportunity to show this process of “stagnation” illuminated by domestic historiography from the inside, “trepanning” the biographical trace of a person in his daily activities of a Soviet and party official. Attention is drawn to the complete devaluation of the sincerity of impulses, that is, the “emotional burnout” of party functionaries who exclusively live in the “semiotic lan-guage” of the party elite, who have mastered this language with its pathos and ideological constants. Conclusion. Any epoch of the “maturity” of the phenomenon is just interesting for its completeness. This, in our opinion, hides two opposite vectors: stagnation, stagnation, which at the same time mean calm, peace, silence. But also the maturation of new dynamic forces in the bowels of the old, which inevitably lead to the death of one socio-economic system and its replacement by another. The space of lexical everyday life is always micropractices that are detected “under the microscope”. But the authors of the article are con-vinced that these micro-movements of historical actors, speech strategies, are also important for reconstructing the picture of the “beautiful” past, as well as large-scale research projects of global historical events.

Keywords

• cpsu
• party
• nomenclature
• functionary
• ideology
• everyday life
• discourse
• lan-guage
• province
• “developed socialism”
• vocabulary
• phraseology
• everyday practices
• biog-raphy