The Decembrist Revolt – Still Relevant nearly 200 years later

Why are we studying the nineteenth century? There’s no way any of that’s relevant today!
Well, here you go! A “documentary” style TV episode about the Decembrists that was produced by and aired on Channel 1, perhaps the most watched channel in modern-day Russia. Beyond the dramatic music and narratorial voice, note the inclusion of various professional historians or scholars of some order as well as the video’s approval from the Minister of Culture and the Russian War-Historical Society noted in the opening credits. Thus, if any of you, or more likely your friends and parents, should ask who takes interest in the subjects we are studying, the answer is that clearly a number of major contemporary Russian actors and the Russian TV-viewing public do.
The reimagination of the historical scenes and costumes makes the Decembrists and the start of Nicholas I’s reign come alive, though some liberties have probably been taken in this process. Several points are just propagandistic as when the narrator claims that the Decembrists’ secret objectives were to “establish a dictatorship and murder all the members of the royal family.” (01:08; 12:12) Other points, including the discussions held by Nicholas and his advisors, give a real immediacy to the situation that might get lost in historians’ sometimes laboriously detailed chronicles of the events leading up to and following the Decembrist uprising. Overall, it’s an interesting watch, even for those without Russian language skills because it shows how Russians now remember the Russians of the past, as filtered through the prisms created by later nineteenth- and twentieth-century valorization of Decembrists as well as moves by the contemporary Russian regime to mold history to better suit its own interests and that of the public at large.