BLOCKADE AND COMPUTER: “DIGITAL IMAGINATION” IN THE MEMORY OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN THE 1980S?

Abstract

The article raises the problem of “digital imagination” in the cultural memory of the Great Patriotic War and the blockade of Leningrad in the 1980s. Using the example of the unfilmed screenplay of the documentary film Blockade and Computer (1983) by L. Magrachev and E. Taluntis (perhaps the earliest example of digital memory of the Siege) the author shows how the traditional discourse about the heroism and suffering of siege survivors, the “Western falsification of history” and the “rational enemy” is refracted into the screenwriters’ fantastic hypothesis of a supercomputer with which “imperialist strategists” seek to code the “Leningrad heights of the human spirit” to scientifically understand and defeat the Soviet man. The author concludes about the paradox of the “digital imagination” of the memory of the war, in which a “smart machine” acting as an analytical tool of the enemy is at the same time an effective tool to confirm the “historical truth” about the Siege of Leningrad and to analyze its “absolute archive”. At the same time, the author argues that, for all the strangeness of such an “imaginary film”, it cannot be considered an anomaly, and in the early 1980s “digital imagination” penetrated even the Party discourse of memory about the war.