Anti-cosmopolitan code in the Soviet historiography of Decembrism

The article explores the way of conceptualizing Decembrism in the Soviet historiography of the mid-1950s. The narrative of Soviet historians about the goals of the Decembrist movement is taken as an example. It is shown that such signs as people, freedom and progress in the texts of Soviet historians enabled to correlate the characteristics of the Decembrists with the ideology of the campaign against cosmopolitanism. As a result of these correlations, the historical narrative acquired additional semantic depth - besides the scholarly level, it also had a culturally determined level. The texts of Soviet historians testified not only to the revolutionism of the Decembrists, which is quite obvious if these texts are considered at the level of the denotative sign system. Due to the presence of the elements of an anticosmopolitan code, these texts contain the connotations of the undoubted patriotism of the Decembrists. Moreover, it was said that the Decembrists’ patriotism was typologically similar to the Soviet one. It is therefore possible to say that the conceptualization of Decembrism was carried out at the level of the connotative sign system. Soviet historiography of Decembrism in the mid-1950s was characterized by undoubted polysemanticity. Therefore, the analysis of the works of Soviet historians of this period cannot be complete without taking into account the corresponding cultural and semiotic code.