The historical consciousness of student youth and evaluation of the events of the Great Patriotic War

• Published in: SHS Web of Conferences 2021, Vol.103, p.1006
• Main Authors: Kostrikov, Sergei P., Kolchin, Andrey A., Nadekhina, Yuliya P., Kryukova, Elena V., Kostrikov, Stanislav S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consciousness; historical consciousness; historical memory; student youth; the great patriotic war; World War II
• ISSN: 2261-2424; 2416-5182; 2261-2424
• DOI: 10.1051/shsconf/202110301006

It is not the first year that the information space has been marked by trends in the revision of evaluations of the events of the Great Patriotic War. Student youth are actively and rapidly developing, adapting to the new social realities. That is why the issues of preserving historical memory and developing the historical consciousness of contemporary young people have become so relevant. The present work is based on the analysis of the survey results of the 1st and 2nd-year students conducted at the State University of Management (SUM, Moscow, Russia), and is a continuation of the research devoted to the evaluation of the end results of the Great Patriotic War in the perception of University students. An attempt was made to determine the level of students’ knowledge about the main facts of the Great Patriotic War. Within the framework of this study, the results of similar works by domestic and foreign authors were considered. As a rule, in Russia, the problem of awareness of the importance of the Great Patriotic War is emphasized in terms of its results, including the perception of these issues by student youth. At the same time, several foreign authors put forward the issue of reevaluating the results of the Second World War and make it with clear politicization of the proposed conclusions, primarily, in determining the historical responsibility for war unleashing. The authors of the present study propose to strengthen the role of archival documents, memoirs, chronicles, and testimonies of direct participants and victims of the wartime events in military-historical education, which should not allow distorting the historical feat of the USSR and its decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.