Introduction

Two centuries ago this month, the Decembrists tried to overthrow the Romanov dynasty and institute a liberal regime in Russia.1 The attempt, as is wellknown, was crushed, and the autocracy survived, but the Decembrists have persisted ever since as symbols in Russia's culture wars.Vladimir Il'ich Lenin honored them as Russia's first generation of revolutionaries.2In recent times, liberal commentators notably compared participants of the suppressed 2011-2013 antigovernment protests to the Decembrists.3Meanwhile, supporters of President Vladimir V. Putin have revived the rhetoric of the tsarist era, calling them clueless members of an elite brainwashed by Western ideas,4 and even, in the case of one high-profile historical exhibition, "foreign agents" and "both disseminators and victims of 'Masonic lies' ."5