Public consciousness of the Russian North in the 2nd half of the 20th century in the perspective of research potential and tools

Historiographical, source study and methodological possibilities of observing public consciousness in the space of the Russian North in the 2nd half of the 20th century are analysed in the article. The project’s goal and objectives are determined by development of the problem of the history of Russian transformations, which the post-war and further reformatting of the levels of popular perception, depending on political and economic conditions, entailed. The tasks consist in studying the factors of spiritual and mental rebirth and ideological circumstances that contributed to this, as well as in understanding the experience of civil opposition to proprietary tendencies with the latter, as a rule, coming from the government sector representatives, leaders and managers. The thesis of determinacy of post-Perestroika events, including extinction of rural life, desolation of villages, moral degradation and general ill-being of the region, is actualised. The author comes to the conclusion that reviewing data from central and regional archives (personal sources, office documentation, social survey data, statistics), reading periodicals and fiction will allow her identifying evolutionary vectors in the future, conducting analysis of the basic features of Northern Russian folkish consciousness, as well as the peculiarities of those features’ identity in the context of social transformations and all-Russia trends of the 2nd half of the 20th century.