References to the USSR in the texts of musical themes in digital archives of the Western press

The subject of the research is a corpus of texts downloaded from the websites of several major foreign periodicals from 2000 to 2024. The focus of the study is on sections dedicated to culture and, in particular, music, containing mentions of the Soviet Union in selected sources (leading Western publications: "BBC," "The Guardian," "Daily Mail," "The Star," "The Globe and Mail," "Le Monde," "Le Figaro," "Spiegel"). The authors examine the texts of articles and highlight key themes connecting mentions of the Soviet Union and music, with particular attention given to the widely disseminated political narratives in the context of the confrontation between the Soviet and Western worlds. The focus primarily centers on texts from "The Guardian," which stands out for its analytical approach to presenting material, in contrast to the typical news format of many other sources. A specially developed script in Python was used to download the data. The domains of the websites were chosen based on the frequency of texts addressing the theme of the USSR (tags such as "USSR" in the language of the publications). The script initially determined the number of found matches when searching for specified keywords within the chosen domain. The novelty of the research lay in the script's use of the yagooglesearch library to perform intelligent and customizable searches leveraging Google services, and the expanded Google service provided extensive opportunities for precise tuning of search queries, which was applied for the first time to the lexeme "USSR" in the context of music-themed content in the digital archives of leading Western publications. An overview of foreign media from the past 25 years indicates a moderate popularity of the topic of music in the context of mentions of the Soviet Union. The highlighted section on "music" often shows a thematic connection to political phenomena whenever the abbreviation "USSR" appears in the texts, demonstrating a strong connection between politics and art in general, with themes such as dissidents, Soviet aggression, and color revolutions being prevalent. Additionally, mathematical data processing reveals songs like "Back in the USSR" by "The Beatles" in about a quarter of the cases. Primarily, this can be seen in The Guardian.