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 accused agreed with it as they believed they could express their political views in that way. Both sides of the process, as well as Emperor Nicolas I, at the same time were mostly concerned with the European press. The choice of sources in the book is quite peculiar. Natalia Potapova, criticizing Soviet researchers who focused only on the cases with most radical confessions, is very selective herself. She analyses only the primary interrogation centered around secret society membership. Аll the Decembrists’ memoirs telling about the secret societies are deemed unreliable, and all the historical documents on the topic written before 1825 are treated as non-existing. The materials of the European press, predominantly the 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, not provedб and contradicts the sources. The author’s interpretation of the last is often arbitrary and not based upon the source study, and it uncritically projects the modern situations and beliefs to the beginning of the 19th century. Thus, the work by Natalia Potapova is not, in the strictest sense, a historical research.