Meet Nikolai Evreinov, the 19th century Nathan Fielder

This is an adapted and fully-annotated blog post version of my latest video essay. It’s just as good as the video – maybe better, because I had to mute and blur some clips for copyright reasons! In 1920, just three years after the Russian revolution, the new government staged a re-enactment of The Storming of the Winter Palace. It was one of the biggest re-enactments in history, with almost ten thousand performers, many of whom had been involved in the actual storming, 320 military vehicles, and an honest-to-god warship. Watching all of this was 100,000 spectators, and actually, we probably shouldn’t call them spectators, because they got involved in the re-enactment too. A lot of historians think the man behind it, Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, was just a Soviet propagandist, but the truth is much more interesting and complicated. In fact, I think the best person to compare Evreinov to is someone who became famous a century later: comedian Nathan Fielder. I’m not saying this…