The purpose of the article is to identify the role, specifics, trends and conditions of the digital and real social environment in the formation of new identities in the post-Soviet space. In this work, the mechanics of identification is closely linked with the factor of activity of historical, political and cultural figures. The methodological basis was the principles of quantitative content analysis, as well as the capabilities of the Google Trends system. The conclusions indicate that with the processes of digitalization and the development of social networks, a bottom-up model is added to the previous identification practices, when such new opinion leaders as bloggers, vloggers, streamers, administrators and top members of network communities themselves create a message, begin to interpret historical facts in their own way, and political events, conveying their vision to the audience they are interested in. The range of risks and threats of digitalization for building the macropolitical identities of the post-Soviet countries has been determined. The theoretical significance of the work is determined by the fact that the discovered interest among Russian-speaking researchers in such types of identity as social, ethnic, cultural, national and civic quite correlates with the increased interest in these phenomena on the part of Internet users of post-Soviet countries. It is indicated that a flexible combination of traditional and network technologies for the formation of identities makes us speak of them as techniques of soft or even smart power.