The article is devoted to the study of the information field that forms the communicative historical memory of students. The content of this kind of memory is largely determined by the stories of relatives who lived in certain historical periods. Although these stories do not guarantee the constancy and adequacy of assessments of the events, it is the emotional attitude of people to the past that is a factor of the formation of value orientations and the choice of life strategy of the youth. “The past in the present”, recorded by the “life story” method, gives an idea of the period of everyday life’s transformation of “ordinary Soviet families” in 1990’s, with the collapse of the regular foundations in almost all spheres of life in Russia. Special feature of this study is that the changes in the institutional environment are analyzed not by the researcher, but by the informants themselves. Therefore, these memories are valuable not only as the historical facts, but by fixing the sociopsychological attitude of social groups, to which a significant part of Russians belong, to the first years of the post-Soviet period. Such type of knowledge is a condition for predicting behavior of new generations in critical situations.