The research is focused on the image of the Soviet Union and that of its successor — the Russian Federation — in the minds of the Russian student youth. The concept of collective memory, being interdisciplinary and highly debatable, has been used in the given paper in its broad socio-cultural sense meaning the attitudes of interconnected social groups regarding the past and the present. The participants of the poll were 100 students from the leading Moscow universities. They had been born after the Soviet Union collapse, so, the majority of them have a very obscure idea of the Soviet reality, simultaneously feeling nostalgia for the Soviet political past. The results of the research show that the image of the Soviet Union drastically differs from that of Russia in the young people’s minds being positive and negative, respectively.