CHAPAEV AS A MEDIA OBJECT: FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT

Thee article ex&lores the dynamics of the image of V.I. Cha&aev in the Soviet and &ostSoviet media s&ace. Using the theory of &ost-memory by M. Hirsch and S. O’Donoghue as methodology of research, the author analyzes the transformation of the main characteristics of the image, its &lace in Russian historical memory and in the cultural tradition. V.I. Cha&aev became one of the most significcant characters in the Soviet cultural tradition. Afteer the fall of the Soviet Union the image of Cha&aev however retained its significcance in the context of rethinking the Soviet heritage. Thee article highlights the following stages of transformation of V.I. Cha&aev’s image: the inclusion in the "founding myth" and gradual transformation into a Soviet e&ic hero (crowding out collective trauma); debunking the heroic status within the framework of the "carnival culture" and turning into a character of anecdotes (de-traumatization in the &rocess of &ost-memory formation); transformation into a hero of Internet memes (transformation of &ost-memory and de-actualization of the themes of the Civil War). Thee author argues that the burst of memes de&icting Cha&aev in 2020 demonstrates a &ost-ironic attpitude to the Black Lives Mattper movement in Russian society. Thee author concludes that the fact that Cha&aev’s image was included in a fundamentally diffeerent &olitical and cultural context demonstrates that the symbolic &otential of the Civil War memory in Russia is entirely exhausted and can no longer serve as a tool for the formation of commemorative &ractices.


FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM
2020 is of great im&ortance in the Russian &olitics of commemoration, because, along with the 75th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the country celebrates the 100th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, which relates to the evacuation of the troo&s of P.N. Wrangel from the Crimea.
Of course, we are talking exclusively about the &olitical marking of this event, since the Civil War lasted until 1922, and, in a sense, it can be included in its com&osition and the ficght against the Basmachi movement in Central Asia. Thee symbolic significcance of linking the end of the Civil War with the defeat of Wrangel should be associated with the analogy between the annexation of Crimea to the Soviet state in 1920 and the reunificcation of Crimea with the Russian Federation in 2014.
It is not sur&rising that the anniversary of this event becomes a &retext for &er&etuating the memory of the Civil War, des&ite the fact that there is no common &osition in the &ublic consciousness regarding this event. Officcial &olitical actors em&hasize the educational significcance of the Civil War, that is, the inadmissibility of internal &olitical confrontation, but the issue of refleecting this &osition in the memorial landsca&e is also devoid of any uniformity. Thee culmination of this attpitude to the Civil War was to be the construction of the Monument of Reconciliation in Sevasto&ol in November 2020. Thee o&ening date of which symbolically refers to the anniversary of the evacuation of the troo&s of P.N. Wrangel. Due to the com&lex e&idemiological situation and the banal unrediness of the monument, the event was &ost&oned to a later date. It becomes very indicative in a ficgurative sense -reconciliation, which the authorities insist on, is once again &ost&oned (Vasiliev, 2020). Theis is a sign of the lack of clarificcation of the causes and consequences of the Civil War in historical science. But to an even greater extent, it is a sym&tom of internal divisions in modern Russian society, which cannot fully determine its attpitude to the events of the recent &ast.
Nevertheless, another monument directly referring to the events of the Civil War was unveiled in October 2020 in the village of Krasnoy, Orenburg District. Thee monument was the bust of Cossack Colonel Timofey Sladkov, who actively &artici&ated in the ficght against the Bolsheviks and remained in history thanks to one cavalry raid, during which the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division of the Red Army was defeated, and its commander, Vasily Cha&aev, died. Thee unex&ected angle of the installation of the monument was given by the fact that it was erected just on the street bearing the name of Cha&aev. It gave another reason to think about the bizarre interweaving of the Russian &ast and &resent (Shcherbakova, 2020). Thee issue actively dis- cussed in the media has several dimensions, two of which are worth notingthe ethical and &olitical ones. In the ethical as&ect, the desire, afteer a whole century, to confront two &artici&ants of the legendary battple again becomes strange as it was the last ficght for one of them. In the &olitical as&ect, it becomes interesting not only to analyze the &olitical actors behind the creation of an alternative version of the Civil War (in &articular, the bust of Sladkov is installed on the territory that formally belongs to the local church), but also to identify those cultural frameworks that transforms the Soviet version of the memory of these events.
Does the com&etition of monuments and to&onymics mean the &reservation of the traumatic inter&retation of the Civil War in modern Russian society? At ficrst glance, this understanding is quite correlated with the cautious actions of the Russian authorities, avoiding reasons for &ublic controversy about the causes and consequences of the &ost-revolutionary civil confrontation in Russia. But the significcant question remains how much the images of the characters of the Civil War remain relevant symbolic ca&ital for modern Russian society, how much is the use of their images in the media or Internet culture a re&roduction of the ongoing worldview divisions, or, conversely, only evidence of turning into cultural stam&s?
Within the framework of this article, the subject of the study will be the image of one of the Soviet heroes of the Civil War, Vasily Cha&aev, in the conditions of &ost-Soviet reality, his transformation from the character of Soviet jokes into a kind of meme, the use of which goes far beyond the ideological diffeerences of su&&orters and o&&onents of Soviet &ower. Thee &ur&ose of the article is to determine the role of the memory of the Civil War in modern Russian society (on the exam&le of using the image of Cha&aev in folklore and &ost-folklore).
Addressing Cha&aev's ficgure is no coincidence, since his ficgure is uniquely &resent in several cultural formations at once: in the classical Soviet e&ic of the 20-30s, in the late Soviet ironic culture, as well as in modern Internet folklore as one of the &o&ular memes. Thee very &resence of Cha&aev in each of these cultural contexts nevertheless raises not only the question of the continuity of the historical memory of the Civil War, but also its nonlinear dynamics, ga&s and shiftes in the understanding and use of the &ast.
To achieve this goal, it is necessary to determine methodological toolkit, to reveal the evolution of Cha&aev's image in Soviet and &ost-Soviet culture, as well as analyze the s&ecificcs of Internet culture in terms of the functioning of folklore images in it.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
From a methodological &oint of view, M. Hirsch's works on &ost-memory are of great im&ortance for analyzing the evolution of the image of a historical character. In her book on Holocaust Post-Memory Sha&ing, she focuses on how the com&ilation of visual images through cinematogra&hy determines the emotional &erce&tion of the &ast that goes beyond the "living" human memory. Visualization leads to a &eculiar effeect, when certain images of the &ast become more visible and significcant for subsequent generations than for their &arents or more distant ancestors (Hirsch, 2012, &. 14-16).
Develo&ing the ideas of M. Hirsch, S. O'Donoghue a&&lies the conce&t of &ost-memory to the analysis of literary re&resentations of the S&anish Civil War. From his &oint of view, this form of memory concentrates on traumatic events, creating a new form for their ex&ression. Moreover, it is &recisely the artistic re&resentation of the distant events of the S&anish Civil War that becomes a &owerful civil gesture, as it makes us return to those events again, look for new forms of their symbolic settplement (O'Donoghue, 2016). A significcant clarificcation is only the fact that the &ost-memory sets a new framework for the &erce&tion of the &ast, which significcantly changes the historical &icture that was develo&ed at a certain moment in time. Theis framework can serve to actualize those meanings that have been "dis&laced" as a result of ideological mani&ulations. It can also create new artistic images that are only indirectly related to those historical events that were refleected in the &ost-memory. In other words, the historical image, which has become an artistic character due to the circumstances, acquires its own existence and it is ofteen extremely far from the real details of the life and death of its &rototy&e.
Considering the s&ecificcs of the analyzed material, both from a substantive and a formal &oint of view, the use of &hilological literature for the analysis of the image of V.I. Cha&aev is of great im&ortance. K. Clark in his work on the Soviet novel identifices the &lot and stylistic as&ects that contributed to the assertion of Cha&aev as an im&ortant element of the socialist founding myth (Clark, 2002, &. 43-44). B. Seth, who devoted the work to the evolution of the Soviet anecdote, em&hasizes that not a literary, but a visual text &layed a large role in the formation of the myth about Cha&aev. It was the famous ficlm "Cha-&aev" of 1934 that became a &recedent text for all mature and late Soviet culture, significcantly transforming the heroic image that was formed in Soviet ideology (Seth, 1990, &. 48). As M. Odesskiy notes, it would be more correct to say that Cha&aev became the hero of a number of myths -an e&ic, a Soviet, a Stalinist ones, and only then turned into a character of anecdotes and ironic rethinking (Odesskiy, 2007).
For the study of the modern image of Cha&aev, literature on anthro&ology is of great im&ortance, in &articular, articles on the &roblem of the func- tioning of folklore material in the Internet environment. Thee articles of S.Y. Neklyudov (Neklyudov, 1995), which raise the question of the s&ecificcs of &ost-folklore, es&ecially in the context of the formation of a s&ecificc Internet culture, are of im&ortant methodological im&ortance. To study the transformation of e&ic characters in &ost-folklore, it is worth turning to the works of A. S. Arkhi&ova, which es&ecially understand the case of "ficlm-de&endent jokes" that are directly related to the image of Cha&aev (Arkhi&ova, 2003;Arkhi&ova, 2020).
Within the framework of humor studies, works on the ratio of humor and traumatic memories are of great im&ortance for this to&ic . According to these authors, humor &erforms a dual function. On the one hand, it contributes to abstraction from traumatic memories, but on the other hand, it is able to cause a re&eated ex&erience of a traumatic situation. However, it is worth noting that these conclusions were made by the authors when studying individual rather than collective injuries.
It is the understanding of the ambiguity and non-linearity of Cha&aev's biogra&hy as an object of historical commemoration that makes us turn to the question of why he was in demand as a Soviet hero, what significcant stages can be distinguished on the way of turning a real biogra&hy into a mythological narrative.

SOVIET "FOUNDING MYTH" AND THE IMAGE OF VASILY CHAPAEV
Thee formation of the Soviet system caused the need to form a "founding myth, " which was the October Revolution of 1917, as well as the Civil War, which became a symbolic confrontation between the two anti&odes -the side of good (Bolsheviks) and the side of evil (all their o&&onents, des&ite the internal contradictions between them). In this sense, the Civil War became an analogue of the US War of Inde&endence, as a result of which not only a new &olitical system was develo&ed, but also national mythology was formed, in &articular, the myth of the "founding fathers. " In the Soviet state there was an interesting &attpern when the heroes of the Civil War began to claim the role of such founders with good reason. Since the com&osition of the &olitical elite of Soviet &ower underwent significcant changes in the ficrst twenty years of its existence, the winning &osition was given not to those &artici&ants of the Civil War who were able to survive in it, but to those who died. Thee living heroes of the war risked taking the wrong &olitical ste&, taking the wrong side in the internal &arty coalitions, while the dead heroes remained the eternal guarantors of Soviet &ower, regardless of which &olitical conficguration it acquired.
Already in the 1920s, that is, only a few years afteer the end of the Civil War, the &antheon of heroes who gave their lives for Soviet &ower began to take sha&e. It is significcant that almost immediately the &rocess of forming the memorial canon was closely intertwined with the struggle for real &olitical &ower among the re&resentatives of the Soviet elite.
Among the re&resentatives of the command staffe of the Red Army during the Civil War, Vasily Cha&aev did not occu&y the most im&ortant &lace, so his death during the Cossack raid at ficrst did not receive close attpention from the Soviet government.
Cha&aev's fate was in the s&otlight afteer the release of D. A. Furmanov's novel "Cha&aev", in which the e&ic status of the &rotagonist was successfully combined with the needs of the emerging socialist mythology. D. A. Furmanov himself, as far as one can judge from the diary entries, was quite wary of V.I. Cha&aev, but the image he created turned out to be not only convincing, but also very &o&ular. Thee newly formed Soviet system, which had rejected the &re-revolutionary heroic &antheon, needed its own heroes. Moreover, it needed not only heroes, but also martyrs with their lives &aving a bright &ath to communism. Cha&aev (of course, not as a real historical character with a difficcult &ersonal life and a &roblematic biogra&hy, but as a literary hero) was &erfect for this role.
It is worth noting that the ficrst half of the 1920s, as K. Clark notes, was just the time when not only the literary canon of the Soviet novel but also memorial &ractices that legitimized the new &olitical and cultural order were formed (Clark, 2002, &. 21). Together with Cha&aev, other heroes of the Civil War entered this canon, either who died during the ficghting or who &assed away immediately afteer its end and therefore did not have time to s&oil their combat biogra&hy with the difficculties of &ost-war life. Theerefore, the novel by D.A. Furmanov, &ublished in 1923, set the social "ritual" that was su&&osed to re&roduce the memory of the Civil War, but additional &olitical circumstances were required so that the secondary commander of the Red Army, even if he became the hero of the work of art, could claim a s&ecial &lace even in this heroic &antheon.
Thee fact is that the second half of the 1920s was a time of ficerce &olitical struggle between I.V. Stalin, absent from the &antheon of heroes of the Civil War and L. Trotsky, who was the Peo&le's Commissar (Minister) for military and naval affeairs in [1918][1919][1920][1921][1922][1923][1924][1925]. Thee commemoration of the Civil War became dangerous for I.V. Stalin, since it meant an increase in the symbolic ca&ital of his main &olitical o&&onent, but that is why at that time the em&hasis in the re&resentation of the revolutionary &ast shifteed towards the glorificcation of the direct &artici&ants in the hostilities. Thee exaggerated em&hasis on the role of V.I. Cha&aev, G.I. Kotovsky, N.A. Shchors in the defeat of the anti-Soviet forces automatically meant "belittpling" the significcance of L. Trotsky as the chief strategist and ideologist of military o&erations.
It is not sur&rising that such im&ortance was attpached to the creation of the "correct" cinematic re&resentation of the Civil War, which was su&&osed to consolidate not only the status of the heroes, but also, indirectly, the status of I.V. Stalin himself in the mass consciousness. Theis is exactly the role &layed by the ficlm "Cha&aev, " shot in 1934 and awarded in 1935 the &rize of the I Moscow Film Festival, the jury of which was headed by S. Eisenstein.
Thee literary myth was re&laced by the cinematic myth, which was gaining great &o&ularity in the mass consciousness. Cha&aev in the ficlm was finally se&arated from his &rototy&e, acquiring the features of the &eo&le's leader, whose death became the reason for the new military trium&h of his army. Thee memory of Cha&aev, &reserved in the local narratives of his family and former ficghters, was re&laced by a &ost-memory, which, however, has a much more massive effeect. M. Odessky cites the story that Cha&aev's son once visited the Cinema Museum, the staffe of which concluded that he was not at all like his famous father and only a littple later they realized that he did not look like the actor, B.A. Babochkin, who had &layed the main role in the ficlm "Cha&aev. " As in the case of "Alexander Nevsky" by S. Eisenstein, the cinematic image of the &rotagonist was so convincing that it became a &rototy&e for all subsequent images (Schenk, 2007, &. 387-389).
Of course, such an image becomes an im&ortant element of Soviet (and more s&ecificcally, Stalinist) ideology, not only deficning the contours of a new collective identity, but also forming the image of a "new &erson" -an ideological ficghter for the achievement of communism. It was the abstraction and detachment of the hero, along with the frenzied &o&ularity of the ficlm itself, which instantly s&read to quotes and became one of the ficrst exam&les of the &recedent text in Soviet culture that became a factor in the subsequent transformation of Cha&aev's image.
According to D. L. Bykov, "Thee civil war remains the last to&ic of the Russian heroic e&ic. Theey tried to make Zhukov a national hero -but he was far from Cha&aev's glory: there was, a&&arently, something in Zhukov that did not allow him to become his own. Cha&aev is the last truly &eo&le's commander: &robably because, des&ite all his military wisdom, he was in battple in the most dangerous &lace " (Bykov, 2020). Theis judgment seems too shar&, but the e&ic and folklore nature of Cha&aev's image is one of the significcant factors in his effeectiveness as a symbol of the "national hero. " It is worth noting that according to A.S. Arkhi&ova, it is worth distinguishing the cinematic image of Cha&aev, which does not allow him a humorous inter&retation, and subsequent ficlm-de&endent jokes about Cha&aev, which became an ironic reaction to com&letely diffeerent &olitical and cultural conditions (Arkhi&ova, 2003, &. 15-16).

FROM EPIC TO ANECDOTE: AN IRONIC RETHINKING OF CHAPAEV'S IMAGE
In the 60s of the XX century, there was a re&eated a&&eal to the theme of the Civil War, which was caused by the desire of the &olitical elite to level negative memories of Stalin and recreate the original Soviet myth. In the media environment, this was refleected in the emergence of a number of ficlms reconstructing individual e&isodes of the Civil War, for exam&le, «Thee Elusive Avengers» (1966), «New Adventures of the Elusive» (1968), «Adjutant of His Excellency» (1969), «Dangerous Tour» (1969), but offeering a com&letely diffeerent aesthetic. Thee heroic &athos of revolutionary literature and cinematogra-&hy was re&laced by an adventurous lightness, combined with an ironic attpitude to both the characters of the ficlms themselves and the reality of the Civil War. Although Cha&aev himself became the hero of one of these ficlms (the ficlm "Cha&aev's Eagles" (1968)) only indirectly but his image was also significcantly infleuenced by the new aesthetics.
A. S. Arkhi&ova notes that the re-release in cinemas of the restored ficlm "Cha&aev" in 1966 was of great im&ortance. "Remember the White Sun of the Desert, Sukhov returns home and he does not want to &artici&ate in anything at all, but against his will he is always drawn in. And the restored ficlm about Cha&aev was very contrary to this idea -such a brave, rude, brutal voyage with a checkerboard. Theis then, a&&arently, caused, rather, an effeect not heroic, but a comic effeect. " (Archirova, 2020).
Thee folk "carnival culture, " which M. M. Bakhtin attpributed the &ro&erty of a unique antidote to excessive ideologization to, made the image of Cha-&aev the object of irony, refleected in numerous anecdotes (Bakhtin, 1990). Thee very change of narrative allows us to talk about Cha&aev's transition to a new cultural layer, which S. Y. Neklyudov called "&ost-folklore" (Neklyudov, 1995, &. 4-6) In his o&inion, &ost-folklore is fundamentally diffeerent from both &o&ular and elitist culture, meaning the emergence of a new syncretic cultural layer, which is the generation of urbanized and technologically develo&ed Thee main features of &ost-folklore include &olycentricism, fragmentation, trans&arency and relative marginality in relation to ideology. Polycentricism and fragmentation are directly related to the &eculiarities of the social structure of an urbanized society, in which various narratives of a folklore, literary or ideological nature overla& each other. Trans&arency is manifested in the fact that &ost-folklore texts within a certain social segment do not form a closed tradition, &enetrating into other communities, even if as se&arate elements.
Thee question of ideological marginality seemed more com&lex. S. Y. Neklyudov himself believes: "Post-folklore -again, unlike &easant folklore -is usually ideologically marginalized, since the fundamental ideological needs of cit- izens are satisficed in other ways, they have no direct relation to the oral tradition (by the media, to a lesser extent -cinema and other s&ectacles, even less -&o&ular literature)" (Neklyudov, 2016) But due to the lack of dominant ideology in &ost-folklore texts, they cannot be considered com&letely non-ideological, since the very fact of using ideological stam&s outside the context of their officcial use already makes &ost-folklore instruments of desacralization of officcial discourse.
Cha&aev's humorous image in anecdotes, as in exam&les of &ost-folklore texts, contributes to the desacralization of not only the hero himself, but also the officcial discourse within which his heroic nature was &ossible. A. S. Arkhi&ova believes that it is ficlm-de&endent jokes about Cha&aev that become an im&ortant narrative, within the framework of which it becomes &ossible to debunk many other "Soviet myths, " for exam&le, the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, the high status of state security bodies, etc. (Arkhi&ova, 2020).
Thee mythologized image of the Soviet hero, who s&ared no effeort to ficght the enemy, was re&laced by the equally mythologized image of an inventive, but not always successful commander, accom&anied by a loyal orderly Petka and no less loyal Anka, the machine gunner. Several significcant &attperns can be seen in such a transformation. First, the natural disa&&earance of those life realities that were well known to the generation of the 30s led to a symbolic re-coding of the meaning of those quotes and e&isodes from the ficlm, which turned into a &recedent text of Soviet culture. Having got rid of the ideological frame that cinema gave them, the fragments acquired their own autonomous existence, ficnally ending any references to the real existence of the &rototy&e.
Second, the image of Cha&aev turns into the embodiment of an ironic attpitude to Soviet reality, which is manifested even in the neutralization of the initial o&&osition of friends and foes. It was fundamentally im&ortant for the Soviet "founding myth" that the hero-martyr could die only at the hands of the enemy, who was understood not so much as a &ersonal o&&onent, but as a symbolic "evil. " Thee symbolic designation of the enemy as "white" &assed from the everyday vocabulary of the Civil War era into the book, and then into the ficlm (the White Army, in contrast to the Red Army, was named the armed forces that advocated the overthrow of the Soviet government, regardless of what &olitical orientation they adhered to). But afteer the Great Patriotic War the negative areola around the image of the "Whites" decreased significcantly, since "fascists" began to be &erceived as the main embodiment of evil. Thee "Whites, " as Cha&aev's main o&&onents, ceased to re&resent "absolute evil, " becoming, in fact, only a faceless mass against the background of which the action of the jokes took &lace.
Paradoxically, Cha&aev became almost the only character of the Civil War era who had managed to safely overcome all the &olitical vicissitudes of Soviet history. Thee Stalin era meant a "reassembly" of the revolutionary canon, as a result of which a number of &artici&ants in the Civil War were deleted from officcial historical memory exce&t K. E. Voroshilov and S. M. Budyonny who belonged to a narrow circle of the &olitical elite close to Stalin. In the conditions of the Khrushchev "thaw" many heroes of the Civil War, who were re&ressed under Stalin, returned to Soviet memorial culture. For exam&le, in many cities in the 60s, streets named afteer M. N. Tukhachevsky, V. K. Blucher and other Soviet military leaders a&&eared. It is clear that the commanders who discredited themselves by &artici&ating in Stalinist re&ressions took a more marginal &osition in &ublic s&ace. But until the end of the existence of the Soviet Union Cha&aev remained one of the most recognizable and &olitically neutral heroes of the early Soviet era, which was largely facilitated by his transformation into a hero of anecdotes.
Cha&aev turns out to be a convenient character for a humorous rethinking of the trauma of the Civil War, since his image is in no way connected with more relevant traumatic memories of re&ressions or the consequences of World War II. And the uncertainty quite corres&onding to the folklore status of the character regarding the com&letion of the life &ath creates in late Soviet society the o&&ortunity for the a&&earance of a series of jokes about the "red" commander, as if he had safely survived the Civil War. In this sense, the image of Cha&aev &erforms the function of desacralization not only of the character himself, translating his existence from a situation of folklore to a situation of &ost-folklore, but also of commemoration &ractices of Soviet society, trying to actualize the "myth of foundation. " In the era of the late Soviet Union, the memory of the Civil War is already becoming a &ost-memory, but active at-tem&ts to actualize it in the officcial cultural narrative are offeset by an ironic attpitude towards the characters of that era, which is clearly manifested on the exam&le of Cha&aev.

CHAPAEV AND BLACK LIVES MATTER IN THE RUSSIAN MEDIA SPACE: BETWEEN POST-FOLKLORE AND NETLORE
In the &ost-Soviet media s&ace, Cha&aev continued his existence in an ironic way. His image was used in several com&uter games, as well as in the famous novel by V. I. Pelevin "Cha&aev and Void" (US: Buddha's Littple Finger", UK: "Clay Machine Gun"). " It is worth making a reservation that a meme is a culturally significcant unit of information, so the very existence of memes cannot be reduced to either Internet culture or Internet humor. As N. A. Zinovieva notes, "the &henomenon of memes is interdisci&linary and multifaceted, and even if we consider only those memes that are information &rod-ucts, we will see many objects, among which will be advertising images, images and slogans, quotes from ficlms and literature, famous works of art and many random objects and idioms that have suddenly gained &o&ularity, and, of course, Internet memes" (Zinovieva, 2016, &.114) Internet memes are only vivid and visual, but far from the only manifestation of the ability of information to crush and mix. It is natural that Internet memes are closely related to folklore and &ost-folklore, re&resenting a kind of transformation of images already available in the cultural narrative. But the transformation of a certain image into an Internet meme does not mean that the information encoded in it is ke&t unchanged.
Thee question of the s&ecificcs of Internet folklore seems quite debatable. So, R. Dorson in his article &refers to talk about "facelore, " beating the consonance of the words "folk" and "face" and em&hasizing that Internet reality creates a s&ace for mixing truth and lies, reliable facts, &robabilistic hy&otheses and im&lausible ficction (Dorson, 2004, &. 281).
D. Werner notes that the main similarities between Internet folklore and the usual ways of disseminating folklore texts (for exam&le, anecdotes) are the viral nature of distribution, s&ontaneity, anonymity, high transmission s&eed (Werner, 2003) In this sense, jokes about Cha&aev did not go anywhere in virtual s&ace, they continue to exist and s&read, although the question of generational diffeerences in their &erce&tion remains interesting. N. A. Zinovieva believes that the key feature of Internet folklore is the dominance of creolized texts in it, which mean objects consisting of two nonhomogenic &arts -verbal and non-verbal (Zinovieva, 2016, &. 114). In other words, most of the Internet memes offeer a combination of text and its visualization, which contributes to the bettper absor&tion of broadcast information by the audience. Theat is why Internet memes with Cha&aev most ofteen a&&ear in the form of creolized texts, the non-verbal &art of which is a frame from the ficlm, and the verbal is a direct quote or indirect reference. Of course, symbolic recoding of such a meme is achieved by changing the entire verbal or nonverbal &art, or by changing individual elements thereof.
Cha&aev's image in the conditions of Internet culture breaks away from the context of the Civil War, &reserving only certain attpributes, for exam&le, enmity with the "whites, " which are being rethought in a new socio-cultural and &olitical meaning. Theis &ro&erty of Internet folklore is noted on the exam-&le of I. V. Stalin and the attpributes associated with him (tobacco &i&e, mustache) N. B. Gramatchikova and T. I. Khoruzhenko (Gramatchikova, Khoruzhenko, 2017, &. 26). Visual quotes from the ficlm became wides&read as Internet culture s&read, turning into numerous memes. In &articular, the demonstration of the famous scene from the ficlm "Cha&aev" where the main character said the &hrase: "Here, Petka, we will kill all the" whites", then we shall live!" became a &o&ular meme.
Thee ironic meaning of this &hrase is given by the symbolic recoding of the key o&&onent of the"Whites". If in the original context, &erfectly understandable for the Soviet viewer, the "Reds" (soldiers of the Soviet Red Army) act as such an o&&onent, then in the conditions of the de-actualization of such a confrontation, the image of the o&&onent also changes. Instead of the "Reds, " the "Blacks" become such an o&&onent, and the &hrase itself acquires an initially unusual "American" meaning, since Vasily Cha&aev acts as a defender of the African-American &o&ulation of the United States.
But if in the 90s such a meme was an exam&le of irony built on the &lacement of Cha&aev's image in an initially unusual context, then the information agenda of 2020 has set a new trend in creating memes about Cha&aev, or, more &recisely, a new way of reading and inter&reting them.
One of the information trends of the year, demonstrating its social significcance even against the background of the &andemic, was the Black Lives Mattper movement, which became wides&read not only in the United States, but also almost all over the world. Thee a&&eal of this movement to the democratic values of legal equality and freedom made it the source of a number of fleash mobs and symbolic acts aimed at su&&orting the values declared by the BLM (for exam&le, standing of &artici&ants in s&orts com&etitions on one knee). At the same time, a certain character of symbolic &ressure, forcing not only to agree with the values of this movement, but also with a s&ecificc form of their ex&ression, caused an ambiguous reaction in the world, which manifested itself in the emergence of memes. It is interesting that the main source of memes ex&ressing a dual attpitude to the BLM movement for Russia was the image of Cha&aev.
Thee use of the image of Cha&aev in memes dedicated to the Black Lives Mattper movement means his transition to a new high-quality level: from irony to &ost-irony.
If irony is a rhetorical technique in which there is a discre&ancy between the ex&licit and hidden meaning of the statement, then the &ost-irony demonstrates the blurring of the boundaries between ridicule and truth, when the statement becomes ambivalent in nature that does not contain an unambiguous inter&retation. We can say that &ost-irony, in many ways, becomes a sign of a new social reality, in which not only clear boundaries are absent, but the very attpitude to any &henomenon cannot be unambiguous. Irony means a clearly ex&ressed doubt about the truth of a statement, but if we are not ready to question this statement or believe that the doubt can be misinter&reted by others, then we can only resort to &ost-irony as a way to demonstrate our reaction with having a roundabout way. In fact, &ost-irony becomes a way of si-multaneously ex&ressing both su&&ort and doubt, reducing the likelihood of backlash in either case. . A. V. Pavlov rightly notes that &ost-irony should not be seen as a manifestation of "new sincerity" as a way to overcome the &ostmodern critical view, since &ost-irony is a kind of cultural &henomenon generated by the features of modern media s&ace and inextricably connected with the s&ecificc &osition of a &erson in this s&ace (Pavlov, 2019, &&. 24-25).
How did memes about Cha&aev formulate a &ost-ironic attpitude to the Black Lives Mattper movement? To do this, it is necessary to disassemble several of the most common memes that combine the image of Cha&aev with the symbols of BLM. For exam&le, one of the sim&lest but common variations of the meme is the &oster of the ficlm itself , de&icting Cha&aev &ointing his hand forward. Unlike the original &oster of the ficlm, the meme is accom&anied by the words "Black Lives Mattper, " which symbolically recodes the alleged enemies, and the character is &ortrayed as an undeniable ally of the movement, which gives the image a &ost-ironic effeect.
A more com&lex meme containing a direct reference to the image of Cha&aev is the im&osition of the faces of Hollywood actors of African American descent Morgan Freeman and Willard Carroll "Will" Smith on the frame from the ficlm "Cha&aev", and to whom Cha&aev's key quote is attpributed: "Oh, Petka, here we will break u& the "whites", what kind of life will come". Theis meme acquires a &ost-ironic character &recisely because the quote, instead of Cha&aev, is attpributed to the re&resentatives of the African-American community. Not only does it make us &erceive the "whites" in the literal meaning of the word, but also create the effeect of the uncertain attpitude of the author of the meme to the de&icted situation. Thee rest of the memes on this to&ic are variations of the ones analyzed above and it eliminates the need to analyze them in detail.
It is easy to note that in the analyzed Internet memes there is a ficnal break in the image of Cha&aev with the &ost-memory of the Civil War. Thee very demand for this image in a fundamentally diffeerent &olitical and cultural context demonstrates not only its unique &lasticity, but also im&ortant laws regarding the collective memories of modern Russian society.

CONCLUSIONS
Thee image of Cha&aev demonstrated a unique &lasticity, having survived the transformation from a Soviet e&ic hero to a character of anecdotes and then Internet-memes. From a socio-&hiloso&hical and &olitical &oint of view, the history of the evolution of this image is im&ortant as an illustration of the &attperns of change in Russian society in memory of the Civil War.
At the ficrst stage, which occurred at the time of the formation of the Soviet state and the &ersonality cult of I.V. Stalin, the Civil War acts simultaneously as a "myth of foundation, " but also as a crowded out collective trauma. Dis&lacement can be understood here both literally (leaving several million &eo&le outside Russia) and symbolically (dis&lacement from the memory of not only ideological o&&onents of the new regime, but also those &artici&ants in the Civil War who did not fict into the contours of the new &olitical order). Cha&aev turns into an e&ic character, the function of which is to sacralize the existing order, and the tragic death acts as a sacrificce.
Thee second stage coincides with the &eriod of the "thaw" and the formation of the era of "develo&ed socialism, " when the de-trumatization of the Civil War is achieved due to two main factors. Firstly, a traumatic narrative of re-&ression is formed and, in &arallel with it, a heroic narrative of the Great Patriotic War, against the background of which the Civil War loses its tragedy. Secondly, the communicative memory of eyewitnesses and &artici&ants in the war is re&laced by &ost-memory, refleected in artistic and cinematic texts that smooth out the shar&ness of the contradictions between the "red" and "white. " Thee image of Cha&aev is discredited, which is manifested in the emergence of numerous anecdotes. In the situation of &ost-folklore, on the one hand, the frank ideologization of the image disa&&ears, and on the other, the ironic nature of Cha&aev's &lacement in new cultural contexts (a tri& to the United States, etc.) becomes an instrument of desacralization of the &olitical regime. Irony becomes a tool for overcoming collective trauma, which is facilitated by the very image of Cha&aev, which is not related to the new traumatic narrative.
Thee third stage is connected with the &ost-Soviet &eriod of the existence of Russian society, when the theme of the Civil War ceases to be a significcant source of collective identity and a resource for stabilizing/destabilizing the &olitical order. Des&ite attpem&ts by the Russian authorities to establish a symbolic connection between the reconciliation of the "Reds" and "Whites" and overcoming internal social and cultural divisions in modern Russian society, the images of the Civil War are losing their relevance. Memory ficnally turns into a &ost-memory, o&erating only in a few images that fict into the modern cultural agenda.
Thee &aradox of the situation is that the modern memorial landsca&e of Russian society makes the ficgure of Cha&aev irrelevant as a character of the Soviet revolutionary myth. But the common visual image generated by the ficlm acquires a com&letely diffeerent cultural and &olitical significcance, becoming the object for creating ironic and &ost-ironic memes. It can be stated that such a transformation testifices to Cha&aev's ficnal transition from the cultural