On Monday evening, just shy of a hundred years since the Bolshevik Revolution, viewers of Channel One—Russia’s primary state-run television network—were treated to the première of a lavish, big-budget series about Leon Trotsky, one of the main protagonists of the momentous events of October, 1917. In life, Trotsky was a ferociously talented orator and a brilliant organizer, who had grand ideas about the stream of history and his own role in it. The show portrays Trotsky as wielding a charismatic and forceful intellect, and as a man of style and passion, who, with equal alacrity, is able to win over peasant fighters to the Bolshevik cause and women to his embrace—while clad in squishy, head-to-toe black leather. I attended a screening last week, where Konstantin Ernst, the director of Channel One, brimmed with enthusiasm as he introduced the first episode, declaring that Trotsky had the air of a “rock-and-roll star” and could be thought of as the “executive producer” of the 1917 Revolution.

The series is remarkable when compared to the silence with which Putin and others in the Kremlin are greeting the Revolution’s anniversary. As my colleague Masha Lipman noted, there will be no official events in Moscow this week, no gatherings or opportunities for national dialogue or engagement with the legacy of what Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks bequeathed to the world. In part, as I wrote in a piece for the magazine last month, that is because Putin sees the Bolshevik revolutionaries as forerunners to those who might challenge his own power today. “Someone decided to shake Russia from inside, and rocked things so much that the Russian state crumbled,” Putin once warned a gathering of students and young teachers. “A complete betrayal of national interests! We have such people today as well.”

Even more crucially, the legitimacy of Putin’s current ruling system is based on its appeal to the continuity of power, and the belief that it is the heir to the superpower that preceded it. This is not the Soviet Union of idealistic revolution but the powerful state the followed, which secured victory in the Second World War and held its own in the Cold War. Putin, therefore, is faced with an unsolvable puzzle regarding the Revolution itself. “From the Kremlin’s perspective, what’s good about the Bolshevik Revolution is that it created the Soviet Union, which leads into the current system,” Andrei Zorin, a historian at Oxford University, told me. “But what’s bad is that it destroyed the ancien régime,” he said, the gravest of sins in a world view that holds state power to be sacrosanct. “Hence the confusion, and the notion that the best response is to ignore it totally.”

Almost immediately after it occurred, the Revolution was detached from fact and deployed as a fable and symbol by those who carried it out. It is probably more fair to think of it as a coup: in October of 1917, the Bolsheviks were but one of many socialist factions, and their seizure of power was more a testament to their audacity and the fervency of their own beliefs than to a deep well of popular support. Yet, in the years that followed, during the Civil War, Trotsky travelled the countryside whipping up support for the nascent Red Army by claiming the Revolution as a triumph for the people, a victory of the miserable and impoverished Russian peasant over his once—and, were the Bolshevik project to fail, future—overlords.

The fall of 1927 saw the first mass celebrations of the Revolution’s anniversary, and the nascent creation of its mythology—just as Trotsky was being excommunicated from the Communist Party. Stalin quickly managed to erase Trotsky from the narrative of the Revolution, adding himself and his own trumped-up exploits. Trotsky was hounded out of the Soviet Union, and in 1940 was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City by an undercover N.K.V.D. intelligence agent. For generations of Soviet citizens, Trotsky was either a scoundrel or a nonentity. By 1991, when the Soviet project finally collapsed, no one really cared about him one way or another. His absence from the consciousness of most Russians makes him an ideal hero for television; it’s possible to humanize and even disparage Trotsky without damaging the Putin state’s narrative about the sanctity of Russian state power, and its own continuity with that lineage. At the same time, Zorin said, “bringing him back has the air of novelty and sensationalism.”

The Channel One series opens with an armored train steaming through the snow-covered Russian countryside, a metaphor for Trotsky and his revolutionary power, barrelling through the expanse of Russian history. From there, the first episode jumps among the Odessa prison where Trotsky was held under the Tsar, his exile in frozen Siberia, and the political salons of turn-of-the-century Paris. It is an undeniably attractive, high-budget historical thriller—in his introduction, Ernst spoke of the show’s positive reception at an annual global television fair in Cannes weeks earlier.

After the screening, I talked with Ernst, who, as the head of Channel One, enjoys a status and influence close to that of a government minister. In 2014, I wrote about Ernst when he oversaw the opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics, in Sochi, a proud spectacle of Russian history and culture. Like Putin, Ernst is a gosudarstvennik, that is, a statist, and the news programs on Channel One dutifully translate the official line, whether on Putin’s greatness or the nefarious intentions of the West. The talk of Russian interference in last year’s U.S. Presidential election has been roundly dismissed on the network. But Ernst is also a man of diverse, art-house tastes that are often more eclectic than that of the average viewer of Channel One. Last year, for example, he chose to air the American black-comedy series “Fargo.”

Ernst offered his own interpretation of the state’s reluctance to mark the Revolution’s hundredth anniversary. “The Kremlin understands how contradictory it is for the country, that there are people who believe this is the greatest and most important event of the twentieth century, and also a huge number who believe it was a terrible mistake,” he told me. “Since the Kremlin has a connection with all Russian citizens, it does not want to take an unambiguous position, which, from a political point of view, is probably correct.” Instead, he went on, “it gives other institutions—namely, television—the opportunity to speak about this for themselves.”

The Trotsky of Ernst’s show is a dandy and a showman, keeping a box of watches to give away to peasants as a gesture of revolutionary magnanimity. He is also brutal: in one scene, he orders the execution of one in every ten men from a unit that deserted a Civil War battle. Yet he is shown to consistently act from a deep and passionate idealism; the show does not give in to the easy trope of slandering him as a power-hungry cynic. I asked Ernst what he made of Trotsky’s motivations, and what drove Trotsky and other Bolsheviks to revolution. “He understood that he could not fit into the social construction that life offered him, and he wanted to change it,” Ernst said. “And when there are a significant enough number of such people, they combine their energies and indeed change this construction.”

I asked Ernst whether he considered such energy noble or dangerous. “It is natural, I would say,” Ernst said. Later, returning to the question, he used a metaphor: “Death is a terrible thing but a natural one. And revolution is the same—terrible, but natural.” That seems to hint at the show’s embedded message: discontent and a yearning for change are just and, in some ways, inevitable, phenomena; but, when realized in the form of revolution, they became dangerous and self-defeating. This makes “Trotsky,” the show, at once daring and edgy by the standards of Russian state television, while also pulling up short of making inferences that directly challenge the authority of the Putin system. One scene shows a sharp exchange between a young Trotsky, then still known as Lev Bronstein, and the warden of the Odessa prison, Nikolay Trotsky, from whom Bronstein later takes his revolutionary alias. The two clash over the sources of power and authority, and whether the Russian people would actually benefit from freedom. It’s hard to say exactly where the show’s sympathies lie. “That is brave dialogue,” Arina Borodina, a television commentator for Echo of Moscow, an independent radio station with liberal sympathies, told me. “To talk about who wields force, and why, and raise questions about the very nature of power—it seems to me that, in the mind of the thinking viewer, comparisons with the current moment will be unavoidable.” She hailed the show as “absolutely an experiment, and a risk.”

Yet the series is also laced with themes that align with the Putin state’s view of revolution, especially in its current form: that such movements are rarely the product of genuine intent and yearning from the population but are rather the result of purposeful meddling and geopolitical intrigue, usually led by the West. The first episode has a scene in which a German financier offers his backing for the Revolution, so as to weaken Russia and break it apart. I asked Ernst whether such dialogue carries a message for today. “This is a historical fact, which has a projection into the present,” he said, echoing a familiar refrain in Moscow. “Since, at their root, revolutions always function according to the same model, many things simply coincide.” I asked Ernst if viewers should understand the scene as a warning about supposed Western plots to undermine the Russian state today. “I don’t mind if it’s read that way,” he said.

Watching “Trotsky,” I could not help but think about the protests and rallies organized by Alexei Navalny, the country’s leading opposition politician, who is currently mounting an uphill campaign for President. Deprived of coverage from official media outlets, and stymied by courts and the police, Navalny nonetheless has brought out unprecedented crowds during his rallies across Russia’s regions. Among his more impassioned supporters are students and young people—the intended audience for Channel One’s show. As I noted in a piece about Navalny and his following last spring, “the authorities appear to have lost a certain sway over the country’s youth, and no longer speak their language.” However exciting “Trotsky” is as a piece of television, it alone cannot overcome that more fundamental problem.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Ernst whether his show risks glamorizing revolution, which would surely be an undesired outcome for a self-admitted statist. “We make Trotsky look attractive in all the ways he really was,” he said. “He was a brilliant orator. He knew how to use images. He worked on his appearance. He could rely on different methods of interacting with people.” But that’s not all, Ernst added. “We also show him as a charismatic murderer, a man who neglected his children, his wife, other loved ones, who did not show mercy to anyone, who did a lot of terrible and negative things.” As to what sort of impact such a portrait will have on young Russians watching the show, he said, “If they like it, they’ll watch to the end, and reach the conclusion that everything ended badly.”

Perhaps the best description of Trotsky—his intensity, acumen, and self-awareness of his historical import—comes from Edmund Wilson, who, in “To the Finland Station,” his 1940 book on the intellectual path of Marxism, calls Trotsky the “aristocrat of revolution.” Wilson describes a photograph of Trotsky taken in 1905, when he was held in a Tsarist prison after a trial for banned political activity: “He sits in his prison not abashed, not indignant, hardly even defiant, but like the head of a great state who has sat still at a time of crisis to give the photographer a moment.” Wilson goes on to quote the diary of a British diplomat and spy who met Trotsky in 1918: “He strikes me as a man who would willingly die for Russia, provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it.” Now, thanks to a prime-time slot on Channel One, that audience may be larger than he ever imagined.