Since its December 2018 debut on Netflix, historians have cataloged the inaccuracies of the Russian miniseries Trotsky. This is unsurprising — the filmmakers themselves have admitted that their aim was never to create a faithful depiction of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, to begin with.

But more interesting than these inaccuracies is the political point of making such a series today.

One hundred years after the October Revolution, and twenty-seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia sees itself as the counterweight to the Western world order, especially its major pillars, the European Union and NATO. Of course, this nationalistic ethos can be found well before the fall of communism and the rise of the current regime. Russian nationalism was a primary tool of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.