Retro Life – Life Under the Dome of Soviet History (The First Article)

The article presents an attempt to reconstruct the ultimate historical foundations and forms of modern Russian life that turn it into Retro life. As the analysis showed, those “foundations” of Soviet history (totalitarianism, building socialism) occupy a special place among these bases, the specific unity of which, at present, forms the supporting structure of a kind of a dome erected by the authorities over the life and history of post-Soviet Russia. It is concluded that, under this dome, by the laws of “excess history” and with the help of the historical discourses, generated by it, a kind of synthesis of some retro orientation takes place, as a result of which a stable coordinate system of the “cycle of the self” of the historical being of modern Russian life and history appears. The author claims that getting into this cycle, its being is not just depleted, but becomes meaningless - there comes a “catastrophe of meaning”. The article considers in detail how, with the help of which mechanisms and means, being under the dome of Soviet history, Retro life in an expanded scale reproduces the freedom of power and the lack of society's freedom, turns modern Russian history into meaningless and catastrophic life.