Revolution as memory: the “history boom” on late socialist television

Historical events and narratives, especially those linked to foundational myths of the communist revolution, were among the central themes of state socialist media and culture, and they assumed a particularly prominent role in the last two decades of the Cold War. As this chapter shows, the “history boom” in late socialist media was stimulated by domestic developments, but also formed part of a transnational growth of popular historical fiction that spanned the Cold War divide, stimulated by new forms of popular cultural expression and the challenge of “postmemory” (Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2012) linked with the coming of age of the first postwar generation. To demonstrate this, the chapter examines historical serial fiction and its reception in two state socialist countries—Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.