THE CONCEPT OF DECABRISM BY M.V. NECHKINA AS A HISTORIOGRAPHIC MYTH

Abstract

In the 1930s. in Soviet historical science, the official concept of Decembrism began to take shape. Usually it is associated with the name M.V. Nechkina. Inspired by V.I. Lenin, Nechkina constructed the image of a single movement of the Decembrists as the first Russian revolutionaries, most fully and clearly presented in her two-volume monograph in 1955. This concept was broadcast as the only true one, began to dominate the writings of other historians, and entered textbooks for secondary and higher schools. However, from the beginning of perestroika and in post-Soviet historiography it was also actively criticized. There was taken a course to revise the Soviet model of Decembrism. And yet, the idea of the Decembrists as noble revolutionaries was firmly rooted in society and turned into a kind of myth. At this stage, the professionals did not manage to dispel it. Because, as the historian P.V. Ilyin noticed, often in post-Soviet works wasn’t propose a new paradigm of the history of the Decembrists. Only the old-one was re-evaluated. Thus, the myth took even more root in the scientific and public space. The object of the research is the works of M.V. Nechkina on Decembrist studies; the subject is the construction of the image of the Decembrist uprising in these works. Was analyzed the existence of the myth of Decembrism in Soviet historiography and attempts to demythologize it in the modern intellectual process. These tasks are realized by the methods of intellectual history: discourse analysis and intellectual deconstruction. The works of M.V. Nechkina are considered as the historiographic sources of this article.