Last January, after the screening at the State Duma of the film Soyuz Spaseniya (Andrey Kravchuk, 2019), about the Decembrist revolt in 1825, Vladimir Zhirinovski, Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, told the press the following:
"A wonderful film; it shows an important moment of our history, the nobility of the Russian soul, the emperor's greatness and also call upon us not to allow any revolution, any revolt, any riot; so that they knew that you should not shed our people's (or other people's) blood or start a Civil War".
In doing so, Zhirinovski voiced the interpretation of history that the director and main producers of the film (Channel 1 and the Ministry of Culture) were looking for, namely revolution (or any real protest again authority) is a bad thing.
In my proposal, I try to analyse the part played by the "counter-revolutionary discourse" in the Russian official memory policies, which I consider to be structured around an interpretative framework that I call the 'frame of war'. The main goal of this "framework" seems to be to disseminate representations that underscore militarism, the external and internal threat (which also calls for defining external and internal enemies), the need for strong leadership, and (heroic) personal sacrifice for the good of the motherland, as well as a permanent 'state of emergency' that makes it necessary to sacrifice rights and freedoms for the sake of the country's security and very existence.
To this end, I will firstly define the "frame of war" and the role played by the "counter-revolutionary discourse" in it. Thus, for the Kremlin, the memory of "failed revolutions" serves a twofold objective: on the one hand, warning "current rebels" of the consequences of risky behaviour. On the other hand, taking the side of counterrevolution, Russian authorities include themselves in the tradition of the conservative wing of the so-called "Slavophiles", those underlying the pernicious side of revolutionary ideas for Russia. In this line of argument, those dangerous ideas have traditionally come from "the West" (France, in the case of Decembrists), which brings us to the frequent (and current) accusations of "foreign agents" levelled against different opposition leaders and organizations.
From that approach, I will scrutinise the film, connecting it to its media context. In fact, Soyuz Spaseniya is a paradigmatic example of similar media contents that flow through the hegemonic media (and educational) system in Russia. Finally, I will try to conduct a brief review of the key representations of the Decembrists in recent history, as an example of the fluctuations in the Russian memory policies.
