Your intuition has not led you astray; the question of whether it made sense to give the Decembrists a place in the Soviet canon is one that the Soviets themselves had to wrestle with. With the Unions of Salvation and Prosperity, as with my own beloved Moscow Metro, there was a rather lively debate about how to situate this pre-revolutionary idea in the new age of socialism.

Some Pre-History

Anyways, for some pre-history: understandably, Nicholas I didn't want anybody idolizing these people. He made quite the show of reclaiming Peter Square (now Senate Square), the high-water mark of the Union, from its tarnishing with an orthodox ritual; he punished the conspirators with demotion, Siberian exile, or death; he had the five most important Unionists hanged and their bodies buried in unmarked graves on Golodai island; and he banned any talk of the events. However, in doing so, Nicholas kind of shot himself in the foot. But only a little. Rather than further agitate, the exiles developed friendly relations with their respective locals, and rather than get pilgrimages, the five ringleaders became the object of the greatest and most surreptitious literary treasure hunt in Russian history.

The intelligentsiya just fell in love with the Decembrists, for basically the entire 19th century. Contemporary writers like Pushkin were actually quite ambivalent about them, but his milquetoast support was spun by later authors, particularly by the radical writers Herzen and Ogarev and the socially critical poet Nekrasov, into a part of their myth. In Herzen's view, the Decembrists became mythic heroes, "poets of liberty", perhaps not quite as radical as Herzen would want, but no matter — what did matter was their impact on Russia, showing the benighted land that it need not submit to autocracy, that another way was possible. Tolstoy idolized them much less, but still cast them as honorable for their stand against tyranny. So literate society loved them, and what's more, all of these literary figures are also going to be co-opted by the Bolsheviks as their forerunners, especially Herzen and Nekrasov.^1

From Social Democrats to Bolsheviks

So it's not too surprising, I hope, that Georgy Plekhanov, one of the founders of the RSDLP, also lauded the Decembrists. Drawing on Herzen, he praised them as the first martyrs of Russia's liberation. Lenin picked up on this, emphasizing them as a model for his ideal revolutionary vanguard. The 1905 revolution allowed information about the Decembrists to be much more widely disseminated, at least briefly, which certainly didn't hurt their growing popularity, and then the 1917 revolutions made their cult nearly official. You know, I'm always skittish about using words like "cult" or "religion" when it comes to the Bolsheviks, because it reeks of the Cold War to me, but honestly, I don't know what else to say when you have people describing their possessions as "holy relics" in the late 1910s.

However, that religious thing is a good segue to talk about Dmitry Merezhkovskiy, whose 1918 novel December 14 takes a much more conflicted, if not outright hostile, tack. Merezhkovskiy, a religious man himself, opposed the tsar, but then came to criticize the Bolsheviks as well, so he portrayed them as valiant but ultimately childish, their political radicalism as theologically immature, and their violent tactics as a premonition of the Bolshevik coup. Merezhkovskiy not being a pro-Soviet author, he's a bit of a dead end for us, but I mention him to show that there's some diversity even before we get to the Bolshevik debate.

So as the Bolsheviks consolidated power, 1925 suddenly loomed. Polemic was the order of the day, and this was no exception. Lenin may have had high praise for the earlier revolutionaries, but not all Old Bolsheviks agreed. Some lamented the overhyping of the Decembrists' anniversary when they should have been focusing on the 20th anniversary of 1905, while others criticized them as bourgeois liberals with no real social program. Despite this debate, though, the Decembrists were widely celebrated in 1925. This is when, as you read, Peter Square in Leningrad was renamed to Decembrists Square. The Decembrists were celebrated as forerunners of the Party and its revolutionary state, providing a model for the Bolsheviks in particular and inspiration for revolutionaries over the past century more generally.

Importantly, their bourgeois character was not necessarily something to hate them for; in keeping with Lenin's interpretation of Marx, if the Decembrists represented a bourgeois revolution, then Lenin was not jumping the gun with his socialist one before the proper conditions existed. So the Bolsheviks were in a weird position with the Decembrists in the 1920s: idolizing them, but also trying to find the right balance between them and 1905; decrying and downplaying their class origins, but also forced to recognize them by Marxist exigency. The pro-Decembrist, anti-iconoclastic side won out, fully enthroning them as "progenitors of the revolutionary pantheon", but it was never as simple as two "sides", is what I'm trying to say.

December In World-Historical Development

Stalin's consolidation of power, as it does for everything else too, changes things. Over time, the Decembrists received more focus in the teleological history of the USSR, as the emphasis from a global perspective on progressive movements shifted to a more Russo-centric one. The Decembrists became symbols of revolution, and objections to them on the grounds that they were just another palace coup or an attempt to win the bourgeoisie political power At the same time, Stalin's fear of unrest meant that he couldn't give them too much weight, and even as they became more prominent, the Short Course made their lack of popular support very clear, while also casting them as patriots. So again, things move in a particular direction determined by the politics of the day. But it's a multi-dimensional movement, not as simple as "Decembrists even more lionized".

The 1953 opera was a whole comedy of errors in itself, so suffice it to say this: it had a very long and troubled development, starting in the 1920s. (Makes Valve Time look positively lightning-fast.) The opera was, basically, a textbook piece of Socialist Realism, showing "reality in its revolutionary development". It showed the Decembrists as a united collective of patriots, admittedly lacking in socialist credentials and support but making up for it with love for the people and a progressive program for the day. Most of all, though, it is optimistic, joyous even, as Stalin would have wanted it, showing the Decembrists, again, as inspirations, but making their failure almost into a triumph for the ultimate progress of socialism.

Everything Else I Didn't Mention Yet

In the later USSR, the Decembrists' image morphed again. For some, they became prototypes for the generations of dissatisfied and dissident-leaning youth. In this framing, the emerging writers of the '60s saw the Decembrists as much more human, but still cast themselves as their inheritors. For others, the Decembrists became yesterday's revolutionaries, relevant but no longer deserving their earlier heroic portrayal — Bulat Okudzhava in particular saw them as "heroes", just not "his". In response, the state tried to recodify the myth in the Brezhnev era, but rather than make them into radicals, the most impactful portrayal of them in the 1970s, 1975's The Captivating Star of Happiness mostly just played them for drama and patriotic feeling. By the beginning of perestroika, neither the Decembrist myth nor the state had become truly anideological or stagnant, but they were trending that way a little, I think it's fair to say.

This is really getting much too long and I'm spending too much time on it, but I refuse to leave out perestroika this time. So to keep it short, with the opening of the archives and the growing discussion of Stalin's repressions, one current cast the Decembrists as victims of a similar repression. Another current tried to depoliticize them entirely, looking at them just as characters rather than as political actors. And although it's not because of any engagement between that current and the public, I think it won; if you ask most people about the Decembrists now, the first association is the 1975 movie, which was not exactly an attempt to de-ideologize them, but largely did have that effect.

The coups of 1991 and 1993, of course, add even more complexity to the Russian understanding of former revolutionaries and uprisings, naturally including the Decembrists — but that, finally, is something beyond the scope of your question.

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Source:

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Tertz, Abram (AKA Sinyavskiy, Andrei). On Socialist Realism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1960.

Trigos, Ludmilla. The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (Now if only I could find a book that did this for Kropotkin in Soviet culture, I'd die happy.)

^1 So I suppose part of the answer is that the Bolsheviks really would just co-opt anybody. Gogol and Dostoevsky were vigorously pro-tsarist religious nuts (technical term there), and among Dostoevsky's more famous socialist characters are a fourteen-year-old misguided know-it-all and a literal cuckold, and the Bolsheviks still lauded Gogol's critique of absurd bourgeois banality and Dostoevsky's social realism and psychological empathy.