“If you take the bread, I will beat you with a stick”. Social functions of narratives about looting Sergei
Oryol region (Bryansk region nowadays) was occupied by the German army from August 1941 to October 1943. During this time some of the local people were forced to collaborate with the invaders. Despite the fact that nowadays this topic is a taboo, there are still a lot of stories of collaborationism and looting during the wartime that are often told in the former occupied territories. This article is based on materials collected in July-August 2020 during an expedition to the Novozybkovsky district of the Bryansk region. We noted that our interlocutors often call collaborators not only the real collaborators, but also the looters. In this article, we try to find out why residents of the former occupied territories still talk about collaborators and marauders. This fact might be explained by the social functions of such stories in a closed community. In a closed community looting is unacceptable as well as collaborationism in a public discourse. That makes local people use the name of collaborators as a label for any person who violates the rules of a social group.