In 2009 Pentor Research International, acting on behalf of the Museum of the 2nd World War in Gdańsk, organized impressive research into the knowledge and memory of the war in Poland. The comprehensive results are published in the book Między codziennością a wielką historią (Between everydayness and monumental history) by Piotr T. Kwiatkowski and others (Warsaw, Gdańsk 2010). The author of the present article comments on this research. He is mostly astonished by the regional differences in memory of the war in a country like present day Poland that is relatively homogenous. He proposes differentiating between what he calls „a stable memory” and a „momentaneous memory”. The latter appears strong but in fact it depends on what the TV says the last week before the research is done.

This article describes the results of the pilot stage of qualitative fi eld research on Russian social memory in the second half of the 1980s. The aim of the research was to reveal what is the image of perestroika preserved in today’s social memory of those Russians who remember the events of those years. The main objective of the pilot stage was the identifi cation of the lexicon of terms and the set of concepts used to verbalize the memories of the perestroika period, as well as the caesuras and temporal characteristics related to the memory of this time. The results are outlined in the main topics, terms and concepts that pop up in conversations with respondents.