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Abstract: In May 2020 have passed 75 years since the end of the Great Patriotic War. The further the history of this fateful conflict for all mankind goes into the past, the more acute and politicized is the confrontation of different approaches to interpreting the causes and results of the war, preserving the memory of the war and its heroes. The surge of neo-Nazism in modern Europe, the destruction of monuments to soldiers of the Second World War in a number of countries of the post-Soviet space, attempts to revise the role of individuals in the history of the war prompt modern researchers to revert to the problems of preserving the collective historical memory of the Past, the formation of the historical consciousness of young people. In what forms and with what expressive means should the memory of the war be broadcast today? How to convey to the younger generation, far from the realities of that time, the scale and tragedy of the event that put the world on the brink of disaster? The article presents the interim results of the Russian-Belarusian project “Remembrance of the Great Patriotic War: directions, trends, memorialization practices in Belarus and Russia”. The authors proceed from the fact that at the present stage, when there is a generational change in the Belarusian and Russian society and the problem of alienating the collective memory from the events of the war is becoming more acute, the task of finding new forms of perpetuating the memory of the Great Patriotic War is becoming ever more urgent, more and more significant is the dialogue between representatives of the scientific and educational community. A study of state policy to preserve the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War and the practice of memorialization of the events of 1941-1945 in a comparative retrospective, it is aimed at identifying those key mechanisms that are of particular importance for the formation of memory of significant events of the Past.