The study conducts a mathematical analysis of Argumenty i Fakty newspaper articles related to the Soviet period of history. The choice of the research topic is motivated by the increased role of the Soviet historical heritage in contemporary Russian socio-political practice and ideological discourse. The aim of the study is to identify the main features of the media image of the USSR, which is constructed and broadcast by the Russian media environment, and the features of the historical memory of contemporary Russian society. For this purpose, publications for the period from 2014 to 2022 were analyzed. As a result, specific thematic clusters reflecting the characteristic features of the media image of the Soviet Union were identified. In addition, an archive of publications from 1983 to 1991 was analyzed. This timeframe made it possible to establish the range of topics that were present in Argumenty i Fakty publications during the Soviet era and to compare them with the topics of the post-Soviet period (2014-2022). To analyze the contemporary media image of the USSR, the first ten clusters were selected (according to the largest number of publications). The study showed that the selected thematic clusters are connected with certain achievements of the Soviet Union or with the negative consequences of its collapse. The articles within the selected clusters construct an image of a strong state with great potential and a rich cultural heritage, whose collapse was a catastrophic event. The construction and broadcasting of this image of the Soviet past in the media indicates the presence of an unprocessed historical trauma associated with the collapse of the project of building a communist state. Such a media image is a consequence of the desire to find stable values in the Soviet past and an attempt to overcome historical trauma.
Balash et al. (Wed,) studied this question.