From the contemporary point of view or Disputes about imposed and made-up versions

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the work by Natalia Potapova ‘Speaking from their cells: discourse and political strategies of the Decembrists’ published in 2017. The main argument of the author is that the investigation falsified the existence of the secret society and the prisoners agreed with it as they believed they could express their political views that way. Both sides of the trial, as well as the emperor Nicolas I, focused their attention mostly on the European press. The choice of sources is quite specific. Criticising the soviet-era researchers who focused on the Decembrists for only using a part of the investigative cases, Natalia Potapova is also partly using the investigative cases herself. She analyses only the primary interrogation centered around secret society membership. Аll the decembrists' memoirs telling about the secret societies are proclaimed unreliable and all the historical documents for the topic written before 1825 are treated as non-existing. The materials of the European press, predominantly British, are widely used in order to model the Russian public opinion, as the author believes we lack other information about it. Examining the methods, arguments and conclusions of the author, this article demonstrates that the author’s conception is not convincing, unproved and is in conflict with the sources corpus. The author’s interpretation of the last is often arbitrary, is not based upon the source study, and it uncritically extends the modern situations and beliefs to the beginning of the XIX century. Thus, the work of Natalia Potapova is not, in the strictest sense, a historical research.

Keywords:

Decembrists, N.D. Potapova, St. Petersburg uprising, investigation, historical credibility, secret society, European newspapers