Abstract

After October 25, the Bolsheviks did not plan on making the palace a “major focus of their revolutionary narrative.” Instead, they would later react to the story of the absent defense, appointing an “artistic-historical commission of the Winter Palace” in order to transform the storming into a political-aesthetic event whose political dimension could be compared to the storming of the Bastille. Theater therefore had the task of staging the “storming of the Winter Palace” as an event that could visually and narratively secure the future memory of the revolution. This was also sorely needed, for the first attempts by artists to represent the revolution did not conform to Bolshevik ideas. The Bolsheviks certainly did not want the revolution to be portrayed as a people’s comedy. Rather, it was necessary to create a narrative that was as ‘realistic’ and ‘documentative’ as possible. But what can you do when realism and the document cannot refer to an original? When the historical event that is supposed to be repeated never occurred in a manner suitable for remembrance? Starting with Aleksander Blok, Yuri Lotman, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, taking into account similar aesthetic endeavors like Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Konets Peterburga, Sergey Eisenstein’s Oktyabr’, and Sergey Bondarchuk’s Krasnye kolokola and focusing on Nikolay Evreinov, the paper argues that the “Storming of the Winter Palace” is not a reenactment but rather an as-if reenactment, a staged production that only pretends to be a repetition of a historical event.