The article offers comparative characteristics of the historical memory of students whose parental families reside in villages with a population of less than 100 families and students who grew up in cities with over one million people. It was postulated that such differing conditions of primary socialization should result in significant qualitative adjustments to the characteristics of historical memory. However, the hypothesis was not fully justified. Living conditions, professional employment, territorial isolation contribute to the preservation of the lifestyle and everyday consciousness of the villagers, but at the other extreme there is a unified education system, mass media, and the Internet, whose influence on historical consciousness is predominant. The common information space created on the basis of the political order of the state and the social order of various social groups reflects in historical memory. The empirical basis of the article are the data of the study “What do we know about the Great Patriotic War...” of the Russian Society of Sociologists in winter-spring 2019–2020.