Together with a sense of growing difficulties, a sense of own helplessness grows both to change your position, and in comprehending it. Resentment of others, the fear of hunger and an in no need for old age, joyless boredom, the feeling that “everything behind” is strengthened. Alternatives to the usual code of guidelines and assessments of the elderly, for the most part, does not have, on the contrary, mainly preserving the vision of reality, which was characteristic of them before, as well as for the country at the previous stages of its life. Here, more than others, they are holding for such an appeal to others as a “comrade”, retain the alertness to the word “capitalism”. The elderly more sharply other groups overestimated the years of perestroika: among them, the share of those who would now not support Gorbachev’s reforms in 1990 grew the most quickly and reached the absolute majority (against 13 % of adherents).
Quantitatively the weight of this group is significant. Its public prestige is small: respondents aged both children and grandchildren are trampled with grandfathers and as carriers of the Code of the past ideas and slogans, and as authorities in the family, guidelines in life. The latter circumstance actually “introduces” general social stresses-and not just recent years, but in fact for several decades-inside the only social institution (family), with which the vast majority of the older generation still identifies itself. But maybe it would be more correct to say that conflicts, who had been silent for many years in both the families themselves and in “public opinion” (nationalized media), have recently reached the surface, were included in the discussion field, but now still and many times aggravated by the processes of demarcation in the «large» society.
With this last complex of circumstances, it is likely that the popularity of family-loving melodramas on television in the last year can also be connected in the initial years of “perestroika”. The television series “The rich also cry” took third place in the list of events of 1992 from the elderly respondents (20 %), and it was called twice as much as the best film of the year. The lead performer headed the heroines of the year. Of course, the unloading effect is valid here: all groups of the population distinguish growing fatigue from year to year, and if young people prefer an emotional outburst, and the average age is a game of passions in the competition for the prize, then the elders are a more routine circle of problems and conflicts of the family, «Human» relations, «psychological» experiences. It is precisely the traditionalization of stresses that converts them to the rank of “universal”, “natural” is important here. This mechanism of “traditionalizing identification” (or “traditionalizing adaptation”) is phase, and in this sense it is really a mechanism, structure. Let me remind you that the audience in the 50s. Already passed through Indian melodramas, the 70s-through the Mexican «Esenia» and the eastern «flower in dust» (as well as in the 60s. — through domestic «simple stories» and t. p.). Rehabilitation of everyday life — at least in senior groups — also occurs as its traditionalization, a shift to the usual, social and cultural periphery.
