Truth and Untruth in Historical Reputations. The Image of the Emperor Nicholas I in Russian Cinema

The article analyses the problem of distortions of historical reputations of the rulers of the Russian Empire, in particular, Nicholas I, who is considered one of the most slandered monarchs on the Russian throne. Attitudes to Nicholas I and to his thirty‐year reign, which started with the Decembrist uprising (1825) and ended with the Crimean War (1853–1855), were and still are largely conditioned by historical assessments of the two events. These assessments, in their turn, have been influenced by the notorious political expediency, which implies manipulations, selective citations, hushing up the positive points while emphasizing the negative ones, arbitrary abridgments of utterances, etc. However, recent decades have demonstrated obvious efforts to undertake objective or, better to say, fair reassessments of the personality of Nicholas I, as well as of the personalities of other Russian monarchs. During one hundred and twelve years (1910–2022) Russian cinema produced about fifty films in which Nicholas I is shown, but mostly as a supporting character whose appearance, in some cases just for a minute, is a necessary attribute of the biographies of his contemporaries: poets, writers, composers, rebels, etc. The article concentrates on those films in which Nicholas I appears as an active figure, interacting with A.S. Pushkin or reacting to the tragic events of the Decembrist uprising. New trends in studying Russian history have generated in Russian cinema, especially in documentary and documentary feature cinema, the desire to scrutinize the events that took place two hundred years ago in order to try to understand why the scions of the highest nobility staged a coup and planned, to begin with, to exterminate the whole family of the Emperor.