Later critics in the West and elsewhere have seen this opera as being well-made, far better than the general run of the Soviet Union's propaganda works. Paul Griffiths has gone so far as to call it "the outstanding [Soviet] opera of the period", although others have denied it to be a great opera comparable to Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's finest works. There has been much criticism of the libretto, which Boris Schwarz considered "undramatic and structurally deficient", making the opera static. Stanley Krebs was disappointed by the shift of focus in the libretto's final version from the love story to the history of the Decembrist revolt; both he and Ludmilla Trigos believed that the opera struggles to solve the problem of how to make the people the centre of the action, as socialist realist orthodoxy demands, when historically they were not. The characters have been called "walking statues", the Tsar, for example, being "evil overdone". The music has been praised for its glossy surface, and for its nobility and lyricism. Stephen Johnson has written that "the vocal writing is sympathetic, the orchestral contribution has colour, atmosphere and, in places, real intensity of feeling"; however, he had to agree with Gerald Abraham in missing "some element that can be isolated and labelled 'unmistakable Shaporin'".
