Dmitry Yagodin, Wijermars, Mariëlle, Lehtisaari, Katja, University of Helsinki, Russian and Eurasian Studies (Aleksanteri Institute), Lehtisaari , Katja, and Russian and Eurasian Studies (Aleksanteri Institute)
Historical reenactments commemorate notable past events and characters, experiencing history and creating public engagement with them through various kinds of performances. Reenactors draw on archival and other historical materials to describe the past through the eyes, experiences and behaviour of the people of the past. This chapter compares historical reenactments of the 1917 Russian Revolution on social media. It takes Project ‘1917 – Free History’ and #1917Live as two cases with different backgrounds, levels of authenticity, technological approaches and preferred target audiences. Project ‘1917 – Free History’ relied on volunteers and sponsors. It favoured historical accuracy and supplemented its main website with pages on VK and Facebook. The main language was Russian, with parts of the project translated into English. #1917Live was a Twitter-based project of the Russian international broadcaster RT. It cared less about historical authenticity and concentrated mainly on English-speaking publics. The comparison relies on the assumptions of affective theory, which describes a shift from structural and events-based history towards the primacy of affects and personal experiences in reenactments. The analysis suggests that conventional structural readings of history influenced the projects’ hypothetical propensity to affect. In addition, social media affordances, such as likes, shares (or retweets), comments and hyperlinks, are taken here as indicators of the project’s affectivity. The chapter integrates research on the role of media in historical reenactments, summarizes the operational contexts of the projects and assesses their affectivity.