The centenary of the Decembrist Revolt in the socio-cultural context of the 1920s: Ways of crafting the historical memory

V.V. Bakhturin

Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Omsk, 644077 Russia

E-mail: bakhturin1997@mail.ru

Received August 17, 2021


ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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DOI: 10.26907/2541-7738.2021.6.71-85

For citation: Bakhturin V.V. The centenary of the Decembrist Revolt in the socio-cultural context of the 1920s: Ways of crafting the historical memory. Uchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta. Seriya Gumanitarnye Nauki, 2021, vol. 163, no. 6, pp. 71–85. doi: 10.26907/2541-7738.2021.6.71-85. (In Russian)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the practices of perpetuating the names of the Decembrists in the first half of the 1920s in various geocultural landscapes. The focus is on the anniversary campaign, which included drawing up a program of events, goals and objectives faced by public figures and the scientific association of historians, as well as the methods and means used to reconstruct the past in the regions. These issues were covered based on the materials from a number of periodicals and the anniversary literature of Moscow and Leningrad, the Ukrainian SSR, and Siberian cities. The analysis of the available sources showed that the centenary celebrations of the Decembrist Revolt viewed and represented the events of December 1825 from different perspectives. In the capital cities (Moscow and Leningrad), a political myth about the “first generation of revolutionaries” appeared. The commemorative practices contributed to the consolidation of the revolutionary images of the past in the public consciousness. The Ukrainian SSR was the second major center for celebrating the centenary. The Ukrainian historical science, on the contrary, abandoned the official version of the Decembrist Revolt and created its own narrative, in which the Decembrists were described as “Ukrainian heroes” who stood on the legacy of the independence of Little Russia. Siberia, as a place of exile for convicts and state criminals, supported the revolutionary canon of the center and, at the same time, portrayed the Decembrists as “Siberian enlighteners”. The commemorative practices presented the Siberian cities as the “places of memory” about the Decembrists. The centenary contributed to the nationalization and glorification of the images of the Decembrist Revolt and the exile of the Decembrists to Siberia in the historical memory of society.

Keywords: anniversary, Decembrist Revolt, historical memory, commemorative practices, “places of memory”

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