• 1 ‘В москве [sic.] это называется “реконструкция”. От дома остается мумия, мертвое чучело’. Comment f (...)

In Moscow they call that ‘reconstruction’. All that’s left of the building is a mummy, a dead effigy (online comment, 2010).1

• 2 In 2006, critics of Mayor Yury Luzhkov’s project for the restoration of Catherine II’s Tsaritsyno P (...)
• 3 See e.g. Mikhail Mil′chik, ‘The Crisis of Authenticity’, in : Clementine Cecil and Elena Minchenok (...)
• 4 As, for instance, Mil′chik, ‘The Crisis...’ : as well as expressing a generalised anxiety about ‘pa (...)
• 5 Mil′chik, ‘The Crisis...’

1In today’s Russia, one of the most controversial areas of heritage preservation, as the epigraph to this article indicates, is the question of how far the restoration of historic buildings should be taken. Everyone agrees they should be conserved, in the sense of stopped from falling down. How much should be done to replace details that have disappeared over the course of time, and the extent of the redecoration that may be necessary, are far more divisive issues. The pejorative word novodel (‘new oldbuild’) is widely used to stigmatise the results of restoration that has been done carelessly, or has left the given building looking as if it had been finished yesterday morning.2 As one critic of the latter process has put it, the ‘patina of time has completely vanished’.3 Yet there is not necessarily an overall distaste for extensive restoration, which may be considered acceptable where it is based on archival research (according to the principles of the ‘scientific reconstruction’, nauchnaya rekonstruktsiya).4 It is these debates and ambiguities around what one architect and restorer has termed the ‘crisis of authenticity’ with which the present article is concerned.5

• 6 See particularly the comments of Serafima Nikitina on the practices of archaeographers working in O (...)
• 7 Cf. the observations of Adam Wilkinson about the importance of community consultation in the preser (...)
• 8 As reported by Mil′chik, ‘The Crisis...’

2My discussion is not an attempt to resolve this so-called ‘crisis’, or to adjudicate, in a final sense, the merits of the different sides. The standard Soviet view that nauka (which translates as ‘scholarship’ or ‘knowledge’ as well as ‘science’) was an absolute good has been cogently criticised in a variety of recent academic disciplines, whose participants have drawn attention to, for example, the widespread practice among researchers of simply removing objects that were considered of ‘scientific’ interest, such as icons and manuscripts, from the communities that used these.6 The Soviet-era habit (which has persisted, in many respects unaltered, up to the present day), of resolving restoration policy without reference to the views and needs of the broader community – other than politically or socially powerful groups – provides analogous evidence that ‘scientific’ practices are not always ethically pristine.7 And ‘scientific’ restorations are of course also always limited by the nature of the evidence available: even the most thorough search of material and documentary traces may provide little guidance as to the precise pigmentation of paints, wall coverings, and textiles. The case of the reconstructed panels of the Amber Room at Tsarskoe Selo – which, once a surviving fragment of the original turned up in Germany, were revealed to be the wrong colour – shows the fragility of even the bestintentioned and most meticulously researched restoration processes.8

• 9 Mil′chik, ‘The Crisis...’
• 10 For the text of the Charter of Venice, see international.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf. (Last ac (...)

3The fate of the reconstructed panels – now in storage, classed as valueless – also points to another potential blind spot in ‘scientific’ restoration. A reconstructed object will always differ in some respect from the one that it augments and replaces; the case of the Amber Room is unusual simply because the distinction, quite fortuitously, came to light.9 Why should the panels not be on display in the space that once held their eighteenth-century predecessors, but labelled as an artefact of the late twentieth century? The import of the 1964 Charter of Venice was, famously, to underline the integrity of a given building in its current state (buildings were described in it as ‘living witnesses’ and were to be passed down in ‘the full richness of their authenticity’). This principle was enacted also in, for example, the British regulation of work in ‘listed buildings’, which requires planning consent even for the removal of recent alterations.10

• 11 I remember myself having this reaction when visiting as a child, in the 1970s, Culzean Castle, whic (...)

4From a strictly historical point of view, a ‘scientific’ restoration may be just as negative a phenomenon as a conversion on purely pragmatic principles, since both efface some of the evidence of how buildings were used in the (recent or distant) past. And the widespread tendency to repudiate ‘non-scientific’ restorations as also aesthetically unpleasing ignores the fact that an eighteenthcentury room with a colour-scheme based on paint-scrapings may equally well strike the contemporary viewer as ‘ugly’: could those brash blues and pinks really have found favour back then?11 Thus, asking ‘how should restoration be done?’ becomes, when one is writing the history of restoration, a question mal posée: instead, we need to understand how it has been done, to make the discussions about practice themselves the subject of analysis.

• 12 There is a widespread view that the preoccupation with the past is an essentially modernist phenome (...)

5Debates on what and how to restore are, of course, as old as restoration itself – or rather, as old as restoration in its nineteenth-century, highly self-conscious manifestation, which expressed the would-be scrupulous historicism later to be embodied also in the early music movement.12 Terms such as ‘conservation’ and ‘restoration’ rest on the assumption that it is possible and desirable to preserve, or to recover, an authentic phase of a cultural product’s existence, which can be laid bare by the educated gaze. The paradox is that this integrity is usually seen to be under threat – that is, the authentic past speaks less to the present than it does to the future.

• 13 Elidor Mëhilli, ‘The Socialist Design : Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union’, Kri (...)
• 14 I have discussed these issues in detail in my Remembering St. Petersburg, the companion volume to S (...)

6The fact that arguments about authenticity, while often resting on microscopic detail, also address themselves to the abstract scale of ideal time may in turn help explain why commitment to the preservation of art works could be assimilated by the political cultures of twentieth-century socialist societies, the USSR among them.13 Yet the precise ways in which preservation should take place, and the nature of the heritage on which it should concentrate, were tricky questions. There was an obvious conflict between the radical modernisation espoused by Soviet political leaders (accompanied by stigmatisation of the ‘backward’), and the attempt to preserve relics from the past; further, the economic and practical demands of the ‘military-industrial bloc’ and those of cultural retrospectivism constantly threatened to (and often did) collide.14

• 15 For a detailed study of preservation policy and practices in post-war Leningrad, with extensive use (...)

7At the same time, one of the most famous aspects of Soviet preservation policy is the sheer amount of time, effort, and indeed money that was spent on reconstructing key sites. As some historic buildings crumbled, others underwent elaborate programmes of restoration that sought not just to preserve, but to improve, their condition and appearance.15 In turn, this heritage of highly interventionist restoration was to shape attitudes to the management of historic buildings in the post-Soviet era. In the discussion here, I shall concentrate particularly on work done in Leningrad, a city that was universally acknowledged to be of special architectural importance, and one where historical revivalism had a particularly powerful hold. Throughout the late Soviet period, these two features complemented and reinforced one another, making the place an excellent illustration both of how salient historicising ambitions were in late Soviet culture, and of the contradictory elements in these. In the post-Soviet era, the city has been home to a large number of controversial restoration projects that have crystallised some of the crucial issues of the day.

• 16 The most intensive discussions have focused on the Haymarket (Sennaya ploshchad′), as will be discu (...)
• 17 See Julie Buckler’s contribution to this volume, ‘Beyond Preservation : Post-Soviet Reconstructions (...)

8A necessary first point in the discussion is a disambiguation of the term ‘reconstruction.’ The most famous (or infamous) cases of this in post-1991 Russia involved buildings that were rebuilt from the ground up, having been effaced from the earth: for example, the Kazan′ Cathedral on Red Square, and the Cathedral of Christ Redeemer, also in Moscow. Yet such cases are extraordinarily rare, given the vast number of buildings destroyed during the Soviet period. To date, remarkably few such ‘total reconstructions’ have taken place outside Moscow, and St. Petersburg – where discussions about the rebuilding of major churches have so far remained discussions – is in this respect typical.16 Much commoner has been the organisation of works that fundamentally reshape existing buildings, while setting out to ‘restore’ or ‘reconstruct’ these. A case in point is the transformation of Bazhenov’s Tsaritsyno Palace, which has turned a building never completed in the eighteenth century from a shell into a fully functioning museum and state reception venue, with the interiors that the original architect never got round to supplying.17 It is such cases of ‘reconstruction’ in an intermediate sense, where the original building is preserved in transmuted form, on which I shall concentrate here.

• 18 See e.g. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies : Reburial and Postsocialist Change, (...)

9My contention is that the debates around reconstruction in this second sense offer more revealing evidence of historical change than the construction and demolition of monuments with which Western commentators on postsocialist space have been so extensively preoccupied.18 If the iconoclastic removal of statues, or the sudden rebuilding of vanished structures, suggest the easy transformation of one set of ideological and symbolic values into another, the modification of buildings that are actually left in place points to a more complex process, whereby consensus or disagreement may cut across obvious party lines, and where social and cultural, as well as political, processes are in play. If one focuses on buildings, one is also able to move discussion of Soviet and postSoviet city history into a different international context. Emphasis on vanishing statues and altering street names produces a highly particularist representation of the (post)socialist urban environment, given that symbolic transformations of this kind rarely occur in urban centres of the so-called West. By looking at buildings, on the other hand, we can see how planners, architects, and city populations across a range of countries were grappling with similar issues, and often adopting similar solutions. And in turn, small but important differences in the conceptualisation and practical management of the city environment emerge.

• 19 The National Corpus of the Russian Language (ruscorpora.ru) includes numerous examples of such usag (...)
• 20 A good study of this process at the local level is Karl D. Qualls, From Ruins to Reconstruction : U (...)

10If the word ‘reconstruction’ has an ambiguous resonance – meaning radical transformation of existing buildings on the one hand, and recuperation or rehabilitation of a particular building’s authentic past on the other (that is, both restoration and preservation) – terminology in Russian is both more and less precise. Perestroika (literally ‘transbuilding’) can be applied only to radical transformation, but rekonstruktsiya also to recuperation. This second sense, however, did not develop immediately. In the early Soviet period, the term rekonstruktsiya was used to signify the large-scale rebuilding and replanning that went with the process of ‘socialist construction’ (sotsialisticheskoe stroitel′stvo).19 It was the years after the Second World War when the term rekonstruktsiya first acquired significant visibility in the sense of recuperation (alongside vosstanovlenie, a term with a wide application including ‘regeneration’, ‘recreation’, ‘revival’). While it was not only or even mainly the cultural heritage that was the object of concern – the pressing need of the day was the ‘reconstruction’ of domestic and industrial buildings – the ‘reconstruction’ of architectural monuments nevertheless became a key issue.20 In 1944, an article by Academician Igor′ Grabar′ in the newspaper Sovetskoe iskusstvo – setting out a case that was later to be enshrined in official policy – argued strongly for the large-scale rebuilding of monuments that had been destroyed and damaged during the recent conflict:

• 22 In line with the general upsurge of post-war Russocentrism initiated by Stalin’s famous toast ‘To t (...)

11Reconstruction thus became a patriotic duty, a way of recovering the Soviet (more specifically, Russian)22 patrimony. War damage was (understandably if inaccurately) always blamed entirely on the foreign invader; making good such damage was an act of national self-assertion.

• 23 Grabar′, ‘Восстановление...’, p. 2.
• 24 Ibid.

12Grabar′ was careful to distinguish the Soviet policy of ‘recreation’ from the radical restoration of the nineteenth century, when ‘totally incompetent restorers [gore-restavratory] would, say, heedlessly construct entire new buildings on the foundations of a medieval castle’.23 Now, Soviet principles followed international best practice: ‘One must simply liberate [the building] from later additions, without, however, adding anything new’. Yet he immediately conceded that, in practice, more might be required: ‘An exception to this rule may be made only in cases where the condition of the monument requires this.’ Here he gave the example of a fragile brick building that had either to be protected by modern roofing (‘which would make the monument look ugly’, chto obezobrazit pamyatnik), or be partly rebuilt (‘or one has to recreate the missing wall on the basis of data assembled on the spot, from the surviving masonry of the wall, and in the rubbish that has cascaded over the collapsed fragments of this’.24

• 25 The word restavrator could be applied to builders (master masons etc.) as well as the architects wh (...)
• 26 This was in line with the general emphasis in Soviet architectural theory and practice on the ansam (...)
• 27 phototravels.narod.ru/Tikhv2.htm ; visit to the monastery in June 2012.

• 28 On Viollet-le-Duc, see Bruno Foucart, ‘Viollet-le-Duc et la restauration’, in : Pierre Nora (ed.), (...)

14This double legacy – of restoration as a ‘scientific’ activity and simultaneously an aesthetic (artistic) one – was retained in later Soviet practice too: the term for a professional restorer, after all, was an ‘artist-restorer’ (khudozhnikrestavrator), and such restorers trained not in workshops, but in art colleges and academies.25 Thus, while great emphasis was placed on the scientific nature of the methods of restoration, at the same time the principles of what to restore were selective. Restorers returned to original architects’ drawings, plans, and historical photographs, where these were available. But they also used evidence from the material traces of the building itself to determine its putative appearance at the ‘optimal date’, the point at which it had reached maximal aesthetic coherence.26 For example, the belfry in the Monastery of the Dormition at Tikhvin (originally dating from 1600, and remodelled at a range of different times between 1623 and the late nineteenth century), had its extant capping removed in 1973, and replaced by the elegant pinnacles that were held to be consonant with governing stylistic principles at the point when it was built.27 In other words, Soviet restorers worked in much the way that Viollet-le-Duc had while carrying out his restorations to Notre Dame and the Basilica of Saint Denis; their methods of restoration involved extensive rebuilding.28

• 29 Shchusev, ‘Города возрождаются’, p. 3.
• 30 Here I focus on urban settlements, but equally interesting would be a survey of the work done in vi (...)

15‘Reconstruction’ of this meticulous historicising kind went alongside ‘reconstruction’ in the sense of rebuilding on the grand scale. Administrators saw the repair of wartime damage as an opportunity for extensive replanning of entire areas. For example, the architect Aleksei Shchusev proclaimed that in the city of Minsk, the narrow streets of the past were gone for good: ‘Through the centre of Minsk will stretch a wonderful park, like the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris’.29 More generally, city streets and yards were given a new ecology: the remains of buildings that were held not to have architectural significance were cleared, and space made for new building, or else for green space. Infill parks appeared in formerly crowded streets; modern apartment blocks replaced traditional tenements, now denigrated as ‘slums’.30 During the decades after the War, this process transformed city environments, affecting primarily, but not exclusively, survivals of the nineteenth-century past (fig. 1).

• 31 See the good discussion in Florian Urban, ‘Recovering Essence through Demolition : the “Organic” Ci (...)
• 32 For a picture of the church, see
  skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php ?t =442332&page =14. Last accesse (...)
• 33 Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England : London 2 : South, London, Yale Univ (...)
• 34 As Gavin Smith has pointed out (‘Hawksmoor Redivivus’, Apollo : The International Magazine for Coll (...)

16This process was generally characteristic of European cities in the post-war era, as is immediately illustrated by a visit to such bomb-devastated urban landscapes as Groningen and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Coventry and Southampton in Britain, and Brest in France, not to speak of Berlin and many other German cities. Here too, a new city ecology based on green space, modernist architecture, broad streets, and scattered buildings took hold.31 But if rebuilding as such took place on similar lines across the former war zones, the issues of what to do with the shattered fragments of historic buildings inspired quite diverse responses. There is a widespread view that Soviet culture was particularly characterised by radical discontinuities in the relationship with the past, and by extension, a mission to reshape history (as in the joke of the perestroika era, ‘Russia is a country with an unpredictable past’). However, it would be hard to find a Soviet example dating from the period after the Second World War where historical architecture was effaced on a scale to match the case of St John’s Church Horsleydown. Built by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1726-1733, St John’s was badly damaged by bombing during the London Blitz (suffering a direct hit on 20 September 1940).32 But most of the walls survived up to roof height, though the interior fittings and roof were destroyed. The church stood in this condition until the early 1970s, when it was summarily demolished. On its site now stands a building that Nicholas Pevsner’s influential architectural guide describes as reusing the foundations ‘most successfully’,33 but which – as a plain brick and glass structure – differs in terms of materials, as well as style and dimensions, from the original church. The results are curiously similar to the handling of demolished church sites in Leningrad when the ‘militant atheism’ of the 1930s was in full sway (fig. 2).34

• 35 ‘Those who strive to preserve not materials but processes of manufacture honor the past not by savi (...)
• 36 D. S. Likhachev, ‘Четвертое измерение’, Литературная газета, 68, 10 June 1965, p. 2.
• 37 In European context, it is striking that the deliberate preservation of bombed-out building shells (...)

18At the same time, Soviet architects did not adopt the position characteristic in some non-European cultures, where replacements were seen as the most appropriate form of tribute to a prized original.35 Buildings were not demolished to their foundations and rebuilt from scratch on their historical sites. Indeed, ‘imitations’ were anathema. As D. S. Likhachev wrote in 1965: ‘It stands to reason that one must never construct forgeries of old buildings, create architectural falsifications. This is repellent to historical and aesthetic principles’.36 Soviet attitudes to reconstruction, in sum, were placed somewhere in the middle of the continuum of possible attitudes – which runs from systematic demolition of ruins to the meticulous conservation of these without restoration of any kind. If the former was not characteristic of Soviet practice, neither was the latter.37

• 39 The main loss, not mentioned here, was the Amber Room.

20The Cameron Gallery and the Mon Plaisir Palace at Petrodvorets, on the other hand, had been preserved to a far greater extent, and large-scale reconstruction of other buildings that had survived in worse shape was certainly possible, as in the case of the Catherine Palace: ‘The rooms are in rather variable condition, but recreation will in general be possible’.39

• 40 For a popular discussion of the palaces making these points, see e.g. A. A. Kedrinsky, M. G. Koloto (...)

21In the ensuing decades, the palaces were duly restored in the meticulous, highly interventionist style that Grabar′ had anticipated. The famous and muchlauded work done here both honoured and entrenched the concept of ‘optimal date.’ The palaces were restored to the condition they were assumed to have been in during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Petersburg culture – the Baroque, rococo, and neo-classical architecture from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The additions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century – the Maples panelling and Liberty prints beloved of Tsaritsa Alexandra – were unhesitatingly ignored. And in turn, the palaces became the model for local architects and craftsmen in the ensuing decades; textbooks and popular surveys of conservation history celebrated these restorations as the crowning achievement of the ‘Leningrad School’.40

• 41 For instance, Kedrinsky, Kolotov, Medersky, and Raskin, Летопись возрождения, p. 22, celebrates the (...)
• 42 The Lensovet order to begin restoration was passed in 1969 (BILGS 19 (1969), 9). It optimistically (...)

22One result of this constant stress on the importance of the palace reconstructions was to legitimate the principle of remodelling as an appropriate way of dealing with other historical buildings as well. In 1953, the Kikin Chambers (Kikiny Palaty), burnt out during the War, also underwent restoration. Rather than recreating the building’s appearance immediately prior to the bomb damage (which had been affected by extensive alterations, most recently in 1829-1830), restorers decided to rebuild the façade in ‘Petrine’ style, not deterred by the absence of accurate plans or pictorial representations. The result was accepted at the time, and in later decades of Soviet history, as textbook example of successful restoration.41 In the early 1970s began a comparable reconstruction of the Men′shikov Palace (Giovanni Maria Fontana and Gottfried Johann Schädel, 1710-1727) on the University Embankment, part of Leningrad’s most famous architectural ensemble, on the Point of Vasilievsky Island, featuring in every postcard, architectural album, and guidebook (fig. 3-4).42

• 43 For discussions of the building of the complex, see Kirschenbaum, 208-226.
• 44 K. L. Emel′yanova, Первый в стране, Leningrad, Lenizdat, 1964.
• 45 L. A. Medersky, ‘Докладная записка’, 1967, TsGANTD-SPb. (Central State Archive of Scientific and Te (...)

23At the same time, not everyone unambiguously backed the principle of reconstruction. During the late 1960s, plans were drawn up to remodel the district traditionally known as Srednyaya Rogatka, now to be the site of the city’s premier war memorial complex (the obelisk and figures commemorating the ‘Defenders of Leningrad’, eventually completed in 1975).43 One issue was what to do with the travel lodge (putevoi dvorets) constructed in the early 1750s for Empress Elizabeth by the renowned architect Rastrelli, but now (after many years in use as a typography) in a condition where it was unrecognisable except to local historians. A project was evolved to restore the building and have it serve as the local Palace of Nuptials (the 1960s saw large-scale development of these institutions for the ceremonial registration of marriages, first at city-wide and later at district level).44 In 1967, the architect and restorer Lev Medersky, head of the Learned Council of GIOP, produced a discussion paper (dokladnaya zapiska) that touched not only on this specific case, but on the whole principle of reconstruction. To move the lodge from its present site to a position 150 metres away and ‘resurrect’ it (vosstanovit′) upon the new site was, said Medersky, ‘exactly the same as rebuilding from scratch and putting up NEW OLDBUILD [NOVODEL]’.45 In his agitation, Medersky placed the loaded term in capitals, and in case the point was missed, he immediately went on to explain its resonances:

• 47 Ibid., l. 89.


25The new Travel Lodge, Medersky observed, would be comparable: it would not be a ‘monument of architecture’ (and hence would not require protection), but it would be a life-sized maquette, a large version of the scale models regularly to be found in museums. On this basis, he did not oppose the reconstruction.47 This rather tortuous argument pointed to his inner confusion about the essential principles.

• 48 TsGANTD-SPb., f. 386, o. 1-1, d. 98, l. 77.

• 49 Indeed, GIOP was an example of how these two roles could be united in the same person.

26In the event, the Travel Lodge was demolished, rather than reconstructed, but plans for the rebuilding continued to be developed until at least 1970, with the expectation that ‘planning methods based on the study of historical materials’ would be used.48 Thus a contrast was developing between the ‘new oldbuild’ (an exercise in vulgarity and mendacity) and a reconstruction – however wideranging – legitimated by ‘scientific principle’. If the former inspired horror, the latter was not just permissible, but indeed admirable. This assumption went essentially unchallenged, since the care of old buildings, like other elements of planning policy, was regulated by a close-knit alliance between city officials and specialists.49

• 50 For general discussions of the work of VOOPIiK in Leningrad, see Kozlov, ‘The Historical Turn in La (...)
• 51 TsGALI-SPb. 229/1/39/51-2.

27From the late 1960s, an element of pluralism in heritage preservation began emerging. Leningrad, like other Soviet Russian cities, had its own branch of the voluntary society VOOPIiK (the All-Russian Association for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture, founded in 1965).50 VOOPIiK’s members, working independently from the official monuments inspectorate, GIOP, regularly put forward proposals for the restructuring of individual buildings and architectural complexes (ansambli). At the same time, the arguments used by VOOPIiK espoused the same academic historicism that had become traditional among city officials. Its members and officials also advocated radical reconstruction where this was felt to be necessary. For example, in 1970, the Vasilievsky Island section of the society pressed the local authorities to think again about their plans for preserving the 1873 remodelling of the facade of no. 108, Pervaya liniya, claiming that this would result in a ‘stylistic muddle’.51 The mild institutional tension between VOOPIiK and GIOP (the latter’s officials felt that VOOPIiK’s members were duplicating their own efforts, and at a lower level) did nothing to hinder consensus on the goals of heritage preservation, and on the methodologies to be used.

• 52 See e.g. Kedrinsky, Kolotov, Ometov, and Raskin, Летопись возрождения..., p. 31-32.
• 53 I recall myself that in the 1980s, friends belonging to this group dismissed the interiors of the C (...)
• 54 I have discussed this in detail in ‘“Исправлять ли историю ?’’ Споры об охране памятников в Ленингр (...)
• 55 See my Remembering St. Petersburg, Chapter 3.
• 56 The principle of ‘conservation zones’ had been laid down in local legislation of 1967, implementing (...)

28Yet Medersky’s very hesitation – and the increasing vehemence with which those writing about the post-war reconstructions defended the policy of the period – 52 bespoke an inward change of heart. Alongside this, from the 1960s onwards, the cult of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg became increasingly entrenched among members of the oppositional intelligentsia, who saw Sovietera reconstructions as a falsification of the past.53 By the late 1980s, there were open debates on whether the traditional adherence to ‘optimal date’ was justified. The proposed restoration of another early eighteenth-century building – the Church of St Panteleimon – to its ‘original appearance’ became, in 1986, the source of a prolonged argument in the Leningrad architectural press, pitting an architectural amateur who disapproved of reconstructing individual buildings against a professional architect who spoke in favour of this.54 In fact, it was the former who represented the growing trend: the 1980s saw an effort to create ‘conservation zones’ (zapovednye zony) on the pattern of those also set up in Western Europe.55 At this point, historicising, holistic views of preservation began to assert themselves over monument-based views. But this in turn required new forms of reconstruction, since the historical layering that was de rigueur in a conservation zone demanded that the environment be de-Sovietised, with, say, cobbles laid down in yards instead of tarmac, and wood sheds and privies rebuilt to replace those triumphantly demolished by the city maintenance department in the middle of the twentieth century.56

• 57 Общественная жизнь Ленинграда в годы перестройки. 1985–1991, E. K. Zelinskaya (ed.), O. N. Ansberg, (...)

29Significant also was the fact that perestroika and the collapse of Soviet power profoundly altered the institutional character of heritage preservation. With the emergence of new, genuinely voluntary, and considerably more radical preservation groups, such as ERA (Ekologiya ryadovoi arkhitektury, The Ecology of Rank-and-File Architecture), VOOPIiK lost the leverage it had enjoyed in the late Soviet period.57 Official preservation policy (whether enacted by GIOP or guided by VOOPIiK) was now stigmatised as wrong-headed. By an irony of fate, the assignation of Leningrad to the category of UNESCO World Heritage status in 1990 (a notable victory for heritage protection) came just at the point when consensus about how to preserve the heritage broke down.

• 58 A. Sobchak, Из Ленинграда в Петербург. Путешествие во времени и пространстве, SanktPeterburg, Kontr (...)

30The context of debates was altered also by the desire of the new post-Soviet leaders, such as Anatoly Sobchak, to invoke the pre-revolutionary past as legitimation, yet also to present themselves as dynamic, modern, and pro-Western. If Communist leaders such as Grigory Romanov (First Secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Communist Party in 1972-1986) had been at best indifferent to old buildings, now Sobchak and his successors strove to bring the city’s architecture up to ‘European standards’. ‘The results of history have left the city with a lot of free spaces, which are empty, or not properly developed’, Sobchak commented in 1999. ‘Therefore, over the next 25-30 years we can expect it to “expand inwards” as these spaces are brought into use’. He looked forward to ‘the creation on the site of the Obvodnyi Canal (or above it – on a flyover) of an up-to-the-minute Autobahn [sic!] and the replacement of the factory zone by a residential quarter’. Petersburg, Sobchak concluded, was ‘still waiting for its Hausmann or a new Leblanc, who would be able not just to “touch up” old districts of the city centre, but essentially to give them a completely new identity’.58

• 59 This plan has been reported to me by sources in a position to know (FN September 2012). For a good (...)

31Autobahn-building and the creation of new identities was to become a mainstream preoccupation of the next decade: among the grands projets ushered in by Sobchak’s successors were the so-called ‘Posh Neighbourhood’ (Paradnyi kvartal), a luxurious gated estate on a former industrial area close to the Tauride Garden, one of the main concentrations of fashionable housing, and a freeway (nepreryvnaya magistral′) thundering past the city’s oldest academic institution, the early eighteenth-century Military-Medical Academy, itself scheduled for relocation to a dim suburb while the territory was reused to more profitable ends. It was difficult to distinguish between real-life propositions and grotesque rumours. Should one credit information that the city authorities proposed to evict the Vaganova Dance Academy, one of the world’s most distinguished schools of ballet, from its historic premises next to the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, and turn the whole of Rossi Street into a shopping mall?59 It would hardly have been more fantastic than some of the developments that were already in hand.

• 60 The word ‘cathedral’ is a slightly inaccurate title of sobor, since properly ‘cathedral’ renders ka (...)

32Yet the 1990s and 2000s saw a large number of high-profile restoration projects, particularly to the facades of historic buildings, and lavish work on individual buildings, including the Mikhailovsky Theatre, the Marble Palace and the Stroganov and Sheremet′ev Palaces in St Petersburg itself, and the Oranienbaum and Gatchina complexes outside the city. Many of the city’s churches also underwent programmes of restoration, including the Kazan′ Cathedral, the Church of the Dormition on Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment, and the TrinityIzmailovsky Regiment Cathedral.60 The enhanced possibilities for co-operation with restorers abroad, added to the availability of better-quality materials, meant that, in theory, restoration to high standards had become much easier. It was common now also for a more reflective attitude to be taken to the procedures of restoration. For example, in the palaces of Oranienbaum and Gatchina, and in the Stroganov Palace, late nineteenth-century alterations to the interiors were not only left in place, but turned into an important section of the display. And the exhibitions and excursions gave visitors a considerably stronger sense of how the process of restoration had been carried out. In the Great Menshikov Palace at Oranienbaum, small sections cut into the plaster allowed one to compare surviving sections of the original wall decorations and coverings with the restorations; at Gatchina, tours passed not just through the finished halls (where sections of lost detailing had been allowed to remain) (fig. 5), but also through sections of the palace that were still to undergo reworking.

• 61 Corners were sometimes cut even with famous buildings : for instance, even the official and general (...)
• 62 See my Remembering St. Petersburg, Chapter 3, for a more detailed discussion of this

33In the circumstances, the fact that heritage campaigners in the 2000s generally took a bleak view of the condition of historic buildings may seem surprising. One reason for this was that people tended to forget that in the Soviet period care for all except the most famous monuments (those with museum status, such as the Peter and Paul Fortress) had been haphazard, with GIOP constantly having to chivvy lessees into carrying out their duties of care.61 But there were also objective grounds, in that monument protection legislation was now far more toothless. With the leases for buildings in public ownership now administered by the Committee on State Property (KUGI), GIOP now had an advisory function only. In the Soviet period (from the late 1930s onwards), the monuments office had been able to threaten disobedient lessees with eviction, and thus to hinder major alterations and demolitions on the part of these lessees. Now, the capacity to regulate had been severely diminished. It was also much harder for GIOP to intervene to stop demolitions.62 At the same time, the most aggressive inroads into the fabric of the city were at the level of ‘rank-and-file building’ (ryadovaya zastroika) – the handsome, but anonymous, nineteenth-century cityscape. Where acknowledged monuments, or at least those assigned ‘state significance’ (gosudarstvennoe znachenie) were concerned, things were different.

• 63 E. A. Sevast′yanova, ‘Реконструкция убранства Казанского собора’, Казанский собор : официальное изд (...)
• 64 In an interview with me in 2009, one of the restorers at the church described this process (which I (...)
• 65 Ibid.

36A contradictory problem was economising. Government institutions tried to do up the buildings in their care on the cheap. So, too, did religious communities. Despite widespread conviction that the ROC was fabulously wealthy, money for building works was decidedly limited. Hence the restoration of the Kazan′ Cathedral’s interior with artificial marble and gold. As a feature in the parish newspaper argued, ‘In our country, reconstructions are the only way of acquiring a cultural heritage and sacred places and objects. The forced approximation that characterises restoration works and the loss of authenticity are the price that one has to pay for bringing a monument to life’.63 Whether professional restorers were called in, or work simply done by volunteers, also depended on the attitude of the nastoyatel′ (presiding priest). Some projects – a striking example was the Church of the Dormition on Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment – underwent lavish and meticulous reconstruction, in this case requiring extensive repainting (by a team of over 50 highly-qualified restorers) of the wall-paintings, which had been catastrophically damaged when the building was in use as an ice-rink in the Soviet period.64 But some other work was done to a much lower standard, as even church insiders readily admitted.65

• 66 See e.g. Elena Minchenok, ‘The Crisis of Authenticity’, in St. Petersburg : Heritage at Risk, p. 13 (...)
• 67 See, for instance, Owen Hatherley, The New Ruins of Great Britain, London, 2010.

39It was ‘reconstructions’ in this sense that provoked the outrage of heritage preservationists, who expended on them the full range of derogatory terms: ‘new oldbuild’, fakes, forgeries, mock-ups (mulyazhi).66 It did not help that a large number of buildings were ‘reconstructions’ of an intermediate kind – only gesturing vaguely in the direction of architectural styles from the past. A turret and a bay window (erker) became the ‘markers’ of style moderne, even if the dimensions of the building were swollen beyond anything built in the early twentieth century. While Petersburg was far from the only place to undergo torture by architectural banality during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,67 the signal failure of planners and developers to learn from the experience of other cities was among the factors frustrating campaigners.

• 68 See e.g. ‘ДЛТ после реконструкции открывают на два года позже’, http://kanoner.com/2012/09/06/60125 (...)

40The most widely disliked ‘reconstructions’ were those of famous shops. According to a ‘Disgusting Reconstructions Poll’ (‘Reiting skandal′nykh rekonstruktsii’) on Live Journal (29 September 2012), top (or bottom, depending on one’s point of view) came DLT, which commentators felt had been ruined not just because, once again, UPV windows had been used, but because the interior space had been turned into a multi-storey atrium, with much of the architectural detailing gone.68 In the Eliseev Stores, an upstart pineapple (definitely not part of the decoration at any period) inspired irritation:

• 70 ‘“Живой город” призывает бойкотировать Стокманн’, Regnum 30 November 2010,

42The demolition of houses on Nevsky to make room for Stockmann’s department store and a new shopping centre (with an intrusive glass mansard, but otherwise in a watered-down imitation of the nineteenth-century buildings it had replaced) was another inflammatory case, bringing calls, on the part of campaigners, for a boycott of Stockmann’s in revenge.70 By the early twenty-first century, rekonstruktsiya sounded as pejorative as novodel: both were ways of naming ‘new oldbuild’ in a critical way.

• 71 These comments are based on extensive reading of materials from the archive of VOOPIiK in TsGALI –S (...)

44In the Soviet period, awareness of danger to heritage was directly dependent on the amount of attention given to this in the press, and on TV and radio. From the late 1960s onwards, the high media profile of D. S. Likhachev had a direct resonance in the mailbag of local journalists, and of Likhachev himself.71 But the majority of Leningraders who felt strongly enough about heritage preservation to make official representations about this were primarily concerned with emphasising the need for restoration, rather than challenging the principles that were used by restorers. For example, in December 1984, a woman who had formerly lived next to the Smol′nyi Cathedral wrote to VOOPIiK in order to voice her disquiet about the condition of the building, which she had seen on a recent nostalgic visit to her former district:

• 75 For the distinction, see Boym, The Future.

48Thus, experts and campaigners on the one hand, and lay observers on the other, espoused quite different ‘memory politics.’ The former championed a supra-personal, historicist, and purist attitude to the inherited fabric of the city, while the latter based their sense of what should be done on the fragile ground of personal memory. On the one hand stood the documented realities of ‘1912’, on the other, what ‘me, my dad, and grandad’ happened to recall. But to see the divide in terms of ‘reflective nostalgia’ – or the analytical attitude to the past – versus ‘restorative nostalgia’, or a sentimental and intrinsically conservative longing for lost material culture, would be to over-simplify.75 In fact, both sides of the argument were at once ‘reflective’ (in the sense of rooted in particular perceptions of local history) and ‘nostalgic’ (in the sense of adopting a celebratory attitude towards the past), and their interest could come together in the ‘radical conservatism’ of civic action, defending not just the showpieces of local architecture, but the large-scale urban reconstruction that had taken place in the post-war years.

• 76 Sobchak seems to have started this : see his Из Ленинграда в Петербург...
• 77 See, for example, the official site of the project, ohta-center.ru/ru/, accessed 18 October 2013. I (...)

49A central effect of rising land values, which launched a powerful push in the direction of greater housing density and reduced green space, was to call into question the macro planning principles of the late Soviet era. Development was now tolerated even within the UNESCO-protected centre, provided this was on ‘lacunae’ – such ‘lacunae’ to be determined at official whim.76 The most internationally (in)famous example of this policy was the project to construct an enormous high-rise block, the so-called ‘Gazprom Tower,’ in Okhta district, which would have been visible directly behind Rastrelli’s Cathedral of the Resurrection at Smol′nyi. In December 2010, the plans were declined by Valentina Matvienko, then Governor of St. Petersburg, after a lengthy and acrimonious campaign, and the site was moved to Lakhta, on the outskirts of the city.77

• 78 As in the case of the campaign against the redevelopment of the park outside Lomonosovskaya metro (...)
• 79 This might seem like so much empty rhetoric, but in fact United Russia’s focus on local issues in c (...)

50Opposition to the drive for ‘restructuring’ at this level – the spread of infill building and the assault on green space – united heritage campaigners and local residents; defence of the city’s ecology in the abstract, and the struggle to maintain the integrity of one’s own particular ‘home patch’ – and with this the general and the particular echoes of local memory – could form an effective alliance.78 And with the fusion of interests came the chance that – for the first time in the city’s history – criticism of unwelcome developments might result in a broader process of consultation that would not only place restoration, reconstruction, and new building under effective professional scrutiny, but also give everyone who used the city’s architecture a say in the way that they wanted planning to progress.79

• 80 http://www.liveinternet.ru/community/769936/post87160101/, posted 11 October 2008. Last accessed 18 (...)

51This article has examined the persistence of an attachment to the radical reconstruction (effectively, rebuilding) of dilapidated structures held to be of architectural interest in Leningrad and St. Petersburg during the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, despite the opposition to this policy among some architects and members of the public. It has also assessed the impact of this policy on urban space. The commitment to reconstructing lost buildings goes back to the years immediately after the ‘Great Patriotic War,’ after which emerged a determination to ‘liberate’ major architectural monuments damaged in the fighting both from the harm that had been done to them by the invading Nazis, and from the depredations of previous generations, the ‘later layers’ that had accreted over the purity of the original. The general consensus that a ‘scientific restoration’ was the most desirable way of returning such buildings to their former condition still persisted in the late Soviet period, though the governing principles of such restorations had altered, substituting pluralism for the former emphasis on chronological and aesthetic harmony. At the same time, once strict historicism had become established as a defining characteristic of appropriate restoration, it reinforced hostility not just to alternative methods of restoring old buildings, but to the entire idea of ‘reconstruction’ – aided by the fact that this term was used by developers and municipal officials to refer not to restoration, but to pastiche rebuilding. The arguments about authenticity, too complex and slippery to be ‘won’ by either side, proved extremely tenacious, continuing to fuel battles about the city’s environment until well into the twenty-first century. Only ‘virtual’ reconstruction, which allowed those living in the city to see the past and present of their surroundings in perfect harmony (as with Arina Glazova’s 2008 photo-montages of vanished churches in St. Petersburg, appearing like ghosts in a modern setting), offered a relatively uncontroversial way of restoring what time and human action had removed from the city environment.80