Front-line community: experience of identification and consolidation practices of veterans of the Great Patriotic War in the first post-war years

The article is dedicated to “frontoviki” - soldiers and officers of the Red Army who returned from the Great Patriotic War and became «the face» of post-war society. Despite a significant set of studies touching upon various aspects of the life of the frontline community, this phenomenon deserves to be concretised. It is not simply a question of terminological distinction of basic concepts, but of the substantive and conceptual identification of key social categories for understanding the characteristics of post-war public life - the front generation, “frontoviki”, the veteran community. The article considers questions of «measurement» of the number of front-line society, its identification and self-identification, practice of post-war consolidation.