About the book: 2020 / The years of the First World War became a time of global change: not only the political and social structure of many countries changed , but also public consciousness, perception of historical time, characteristic of the 19th century. The war was largely the culmination of a crisis caused by the collision of traditional culture and the emerging culture of modernity. In his fundamental monograph, historian V. Aksenov shows how this crisis manifested itself at the level of mass sentiment in Russia. The author analyzes patriotic ideas, mass actions, visual images, religious and political symbolism, peasant discourse, written urban culture, phobias, rumors and related emotions. According to the author, by 1917, the emotional perception of reality began to prevail over the rational-logical one, and the conflict between traditional and modern worldviews did not allow Russian society to unite on the basis of patriotic ideas built around outdated autocratic mythology. During the 1917 revolution, rumors largely determined the course of political events. Vladislav Aksenov is a specialist in the social history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, senior researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.