ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the February Revolution in 1917 as it was remediated in RT’s Twitter project #1917LIVE. A fictional media outlet, Russian Telegraph, telegraphs/tweets in the style of a 21st-century news agency about the events in Russia 1917, as they unfold day by day, providing their followers with breaking-news reports and live footage from a revolution evolving 100 years ago. The #1917LIVE timeline brings together different times, different media and different text genres in a patchwork of messages, meanings and modes of address, subsumed under the formula ‘history as current affairs’. The chapter demonstrates how #1917LIVE as a popular history project builds on contemporary politics and popular culture to construct a remediated version of the revolution that, on the one hand, disarms the political content of the original protests by packaging them in an entertaining format, and, on the other, makes history congruent with RT’s conception of the world of today.
