Abstract
The importance of idealised visions of the past to local identity in twentieth-century St Petersburg and Leningrad has been widely recognised, but previous discussions have generally assumed an unproblematic continuation between the ‘Old St Petersburg’ preservationism of the early twentieth century and the heritage movement at later eras. This article argues that views of local identity in ‘the city on the Neva’ were more diverse than often recognised, not just because Leningrad artists, in particular architects, were committed to the modernist movement, but because the idea of which ‘past’ should be preserved was also controversial. Even in the 1920s, the ‘Old St Petersburg’ society advocated demolishing what its members considered unimportant and aesthetically unpleasing historical buildings. The revival of preservationism on a wide scale in the 1960s in turn took as its ideal an explicitly ‘Soviet’ view of the city, one where churches and trading zones had a much less important place than in historical St Petersburg before 1917. Drawing on documents from the ‘Old St Petersburg Society’ and the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments (VOOPIiK) held in St Petersburg archives, the article points to a process by which preservationism has, paradoxically, become more controversial as the territory of heritage has expanded, and the traditional focus on ‘monuments’ and ‘ensembles’ was replaced by a commitment to the preservation of entire ‘zones’, and eventually of the ‘historic centre’ (a term that itself begs many questions about what is counted as ‘historic’, since there are numerous centrally-located pre-1917 buildings that lie beyond this area).
In July 2008, the St Petersburg journalist Dmitry Gulin launched an impassioned attack on the city's governor, Valentina Matvienko, accusing her of being out of touch with the spirit of Russia's ‘second capital’ and of betraying the metropolis that she was supposed to oversee:
If it weren't for Petersburg, I wouldn't want to live in Russia at all. Russia is an ugly, coarse country, but Petersburg, as the result of certain historical peculiarities, is an exception to the rule. It is a stage set, it has a beautiful patina, and it looks like a city out of a golden dream – with that fantastic horizontal line against the sky, an Italy or a Greece in the far north. But now the stage set is being destroyed with incredible speed, because the actors – people I don't much respect, along with their fast bucks, are changing not just the scenery, but life as well. Someone I know – let's call him X – who is uncannily like a liberal, Western-inclined secretary of the Central Committee in terms of his ideology (assuming one can imagine them letting someone like that in there in the first place), a kind of ‘Paul Paulich Kirsanov’
1
From the name of the aging liberal, Arkady's uncle, in Turgenev's Ottsy i deti, combined with ‘Pal Palich’, a negligent pronunciation of ‘Pavel Pavlovich’ that suggests a standard figure – cf. ‘Joe Soap’ in Anglophone usage. i.e. principles (prinsipy, mis-spelt, in the original). Val'ka-Stakan: literally, Val'ka the Glass, allegedly the Komsomol nickname of Valentina Matvienko.
‘Unhappy woman’ my foot – she's a pushy self-promoter from the boondocks [proshmandovka shepetovskaya], if you ask me. Correction: it's hardly her fault she had the misfortune to be born in Shepetovka, but it is that she's tearing and knocking down Piter with all the arrogance of a loudmouthed provincial slag [provintsial'naya tetekha]. She loves ersatz old, though: it's as comfortable and easy to understand as a fake Persian carpet hanging on your wall. 4
1 July 2008, http://dimagubin.livejournal.com/36351.html. Accessed 8 July 2008.
Gulin's text raises a whole variety of issues: the way that online blogs have replaced chats round the kitchen table as a means of letting off steam that official news outlets will not allow to escape; the unmodified tendency of political commentators to deem leading politicians responsible for everything that happens in their fiefdoms; not least, of course, the use of misogynist rhetoric against the sole woman holding high political office in Russia at the time. What concerns me here, however, is the view of St Petersburg that emerges from these remarks. These pay tribute to the intelligentsia myth of a city that is somehow not ‘Russian’ (or which is ‘Russian’ only in the most positive sense – a locus of elite, intellectual culture and high moral values) 5
An entertaining literalisation of this idea was the utopian plan some years ago to construct a ‘St Petersburg republic’, with additional territory added by artificial islands in the Gulf of Finland. (Pers. inf. from a St Petersburger born in 1950, 2004).
The artificiality of St Petersburg is of course a literary and cultural trope of considerable antiquity, as discussed in V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst, and such spin-off analyses as Julie Buckler (2005). See also the comments of Andrei Bitov in 1992: ‘We used to call Petersburg a stage set – because of a slightly theatrical feeling about the place, a kind of artificiality. It's now like a stage set of a stage set, practically a mirage. It's morally and physically exhausted to the point of no return, and that's become its new self [oblik]’. (Tokareva, 1992).
Anyone who knows anything about St Petersburg can hardly avoid realising that the fate of the so-called ‘historic centre’ has been the focus of intense, and often very acrimonious, debate over the past few years. Particularly controversial projects include the new building of the Mariinsky Theatre, next to the old one; the restructuring of Novaya Gollandiya's wharves and warehouses to place a high-tech building by Sir Norman Foster inside the eighteenth-century walls of the original site; and above all the ‘Gazprom Tower’ (officially known as Okhta-Tsentr), a skyscraper that is set to dominate the horizon behind the Smol'nyi Convent (unless the current economic crisis puts paid to the scheme, as many hope will happen). At the moment, outrage is running high because the construction of a financial centre on Vasilievsky Island has added a ‘monstrous carbuncle’ to the city's most famous view, the Strelka (already, some think, disfigured by the line of upstart fountains that blocks parts of the perspective from Palace Square on the other side of the Neva).
In a poll held as part of a 6-h ‘telemarathon’ on local St Petersburg television (Channel 100, 7 pm–1 am on 25–26 June 2008), those unambiguously in favour of modernising the city represented a proportion of around 3 per cent. The most vocal supporters of preservationism may be ginger groups such as Zhivoi gorod, most of whose members are young and with limited cultural and social capital, or more radical associations such as ‘ERA’ (Ekologiya ryadovoi arkhitektury, Ecology of Ordinary Architecture). 7
http://www.save-spb.ru/ (Zhivoi gorod), http://era.grouping.ru/ (ERA). These groups focus particularly on petitioning, flyposting, and on different types of aktsii. When I attended a meeting of Zhivoi gorod on 2 July 2008, for example, there was discussion of a demonstration based on Gogol's Dead Souls; previous aktsii have included meetings in Central St Petersburg where collections of architectural models are presented, and so on. It was members of the two groups themselves who described ERA as ‘more radical’.
From the visitors’ book at the exhibition, inspected during my visit on 10 April 2009. There was real distress on the faces of many visitors too, and many adverse comments aired aloud. A selection of vox-pops on Ekho Moskvy on 12 April 2009 was also largely hostile (my thanks to Al'bert Baiburin for this information).
The debate on the preservation of monuments crystallises many of the key political issues in St Petersburg: the attempts of private property owners and institutional lessees to exercise their tenuous legal rights in the face of pressure from commercial and political power groups (and usually the two work in concert); the collapse of old certainties about what the appropriate values in city planning should now be; the attempt to reconcile the urgent need to renew the city's infrastructure and especially to mitigate its formidable traffic and housing problems with the demands imposed by the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site; and the search for an authoritative version of the past now that the old Soviet teleologies have been largely discredited. In many respects also, the debate has become a test case for civil society – anti-modernisation and pro-ecology groups encourage inhabitants of St Petersburg to know, and to use, their rights. 9
See e.g. the site for ECOM, an organisation specialising in what they term ‘tekhnologiya obshchestvennogo uchastiya’ [the technology of social participation], http://www.ecominfo.spb.ru/.
The hearings are dismissed on first principles by many campaigners in the preservationist movement as simply an exercise in pokazukha (democracy for show). In addition, there have recently been reports of pro-development interests recruiting claques of ‘supporters’ (for a fee of 400 roubles, or about 15 dollars, the cost of quite a generous restaurant lunch, or put differently, of two bottles of vodka).
Of course, some support for new building exists. Architects feel constrained by the idea of a ‘museum city’ in much the same way as their counterparts in other major European cities (Paris and London come to mind); people in banks and companies want their workplaces reconstructed in the anonymous style of the Fourth Business International; members of the lay public often want to live in new buildings, even if they would rather look at old ones; everyone admits that much of the pre-revolutionary fabric of the city needs to be ‘conserved’ (a euphemistic way of saying, stopped from falling down). But there is a startling similarity in the modes of expression used. All participants in the debate voice commitment to the beauty and historical importance of St Petersburg. However, the sense of what, in practical terms, this signifies varies considerably from group to group. The discussion that follows is intended to place this consensus and conflict in historical perspective.
The current campaign to save the architectural heritage in St Petersburg is often taken to be simply a continuation of an unbroken tradition of deep love for the city among its most talented and committed inhabitants. A standard history of preservationism runs through the beginnings of the architectural heritage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, as marked in publications such as Stolitsa i usad'ba and Starye gody, takes in the kraevedenie [local studies] and muzei byta [museums of daily life] of the 1920s (particularly the work of Nikolai Antsiferov at the Institute for Art History and the ‘Old Petersburg’ society), refers to the heroic efforts of Leningraders to preserve their city during the Great Patriotic War, surveys the integration of conservationist ambitions into city plans and the burgeoning library of local history publications during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and proceeds to the triumphant restoration of the name ‘St Petersburg’ in 1992. 11
See e.g. Lisa Kirschenbaum (2006); Yury Piryutko (2008); Goscilo and Norris (2008). It is also the preservationism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that has attracted by far the most discussion: see e.g. Johnson (2006), or the material on preservationism in Katerina Clark's Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (1995), to mention only studies in English. Modern Leningrad/St Petersburg (as Piryutko in fact points out) attracts far less study from any point of view than the history of the city before 1930. While some analyses relating to the literary culture and artistic subculture (‘the system’, roughly equivalent to the Anglo-American term ‘scene’) of Piter have appeared (for example, the studies by Stanislav Savitsky (2002) and Tat'yana Shchepanskaya (2004), generally, studies fall into two kinds. One such is essayistic evocations that draw heavily on the personal experience of former Leningrad insiders (e.g. Boym, (1994, 2001), or Alexei Yurchak (2006); both these books are much more sophisticated and self-conscious in their use of recollection than Solomon Volkov (1991), though Volkov's personal recollections of the musical and artistic scene in the post-war decades are of interest. The other type of material comprises general social histories of Leningrad in the recent past, which tend to omit the ‘cultural memory’ side of things altogether, presenting instead a top-down picture of administrative structures and socio-economic planning: see e.g. Vakser (2005), Blair Ruble (1990). Architectural historians (e.g. Boris Kirikov, Margarita Shtiglits, William Brumfield) working on St Petersburg have been concerned primarily with the history of buildings and architects, not with architecture as a socio-cultural phenomenon.
On the repression of the city museum, (a profile of L. N. Belova, director of the revived Muzei istorii Leningrada). For a balanced account of the ups and downs of local history, see the article by Lur'e and Kobak (1993) in a special issue of the journal Petersburg ars, which argues that the ‘Petersburg idea’ dominated intellectual life at two periods: the 1920s and the 1970s through to the late 1980s. Though I would place the renaissance of the ‘idea’ a little earlier and place more emphasis here on how it ‘edited’ the past of the city, I am in broad agreement with these conclusions. A slightly earlier and therefore more ‘Soviet’, but interesting discussion of official preservation of the past through legislation etc. is Kirikov (1988).
The decree was published in Izvestiya on 4 December 1931 and republished in Vestnik Lensoveta no. 126 (1931), p. 1.
This work has started to attract scholarly attention only relatively recently. See, for example, Boris Kirikov (2009). The history of literary and cultural modernism after the Revolution, on the other hand, has been exhaustively explored: see e.g. Karl Schlögel (1988); Clark, Petersburg, etc.
On the names and the history of the architecture, see Yakovchenko (1986). The restructuring was intended to provide Leningrad with a system of parade squares and major roads resembling those constructed in Central Moscow (along Prospekt Marksa and into Red Square): ‘In front of the House of Soviets, a large square for demonstrations was planned; on the axis of the main thoroughfare (now Leninskii prospekt and ulitsa Tipa-nova), it was planned to construct a whole “necklace” of squares – which unfortunately never materialised – Teatral'naya, Kruglaya, and avant-places and arriere-places, and to the south and north of the House of Soviets along Moskovskoe shosse were two other squares for demonstrations, which were named precisely for their locations: Yuzhnaya and Severnaya’ (Yakovchenko, Moskovskii prospekt, p. 83).
Extensive building also took place in the late 1940s and 1950s in areas of the city such as Avtovo and Udel'naya; some major buildings were also erected in the city centre, such as the Lenproekt building on ploshchad’ Revolyutsii. The neo-classical style of the Stalin-era constructions is often held to be a continuation of St Petersburg modernism (and it is true that some architects, such as Evgeny Benua, worked in the city both before and after 1917). 16
Others, as Yury Piryutko has recently pointed out (see his Piterskii leksikon, article ‘Zodchie’) departed to Moscow, where they played a major role in the development of the Moscow Stalin-era planned city (zastroika). One can see a kind of process whereby the Petersburg late Imperial style is adapted for Soviet Moscow, and then exported back from there to the home city.
The after-effects of this process can be observed on lines 2 and 3 of Vasilievsky Island, for example.
There was little attempt, at this period, to harmonise the style of the new structures with those that stood around them. Vasilievskostrovskaya metro station on Line 7 of Vasilievsky Island, for example, constructed in the late 1960s, was built back from the traditional line of the street (the krasnaya liniya), and employed the steel-frame-and-glass style that was widely used for keynote functional buildings (doma byta, for example) at this point. 18
On the planning of this area, see TsGANTD-SPb. (Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv nauchno-tekhnicheskoi dokumentatsii Sankt-Peterburga), f. 36, op. 4–4, d. 44, esp. l. 28 (Ya. D. Bolotin, the architect, comments: ‘I have known this area since 1936. The whole of Vasilievsky Island, Srednii, Malyi, Bol'shoi prospekt has the streets clearly delineated. And it is good that here, suddenly, in one particular place, there will be a structure like this, one with a quite different character, one that emerges from the run-of-the-mill building. Which is why we have to treat this section in a more characteristic way, a more modern way […] and exactly this treatment, based on a contrast between a modern glass building that is not on the ordinary street frontage, but set back, but which [l. 29] does not disrupt the system set up by Srednii prospekt and the 7-ya liniya is, in our opinion, the right resolution for the situation in question.’ The argument here is completely circular: the building needs to be of a ‘characteristic’ kind because the site requires a ‘characteristic’ building (by implication, Vasilievsky Island was ‘modern’ before its time).
Such structures were the pride and joy of the architectural profession. The lead article in the first issue for 1961 of the professional journal Building and Architecture consisted of a lengthy eulogy to recently-completed new building projects, notably the building of 150 new shops and enterprises, and the construction of the ‘simple, severe [new] building of the Finland Station, erected in accordance with the demands of contemporary standards in building and architecture’. 19
Stroitel'stvo i arkhitektura 1 (1961), 1 (untitled editorial).
See e.g. (about the plan for a high-speed motorway in the area of the Obvodny Canal); Charnetsky, Papov, and Gol'denberg (1961) (on motels); Lyubosh (1965) (on new districts); Petrov (1975) (on Pulkovo airport).
See e.g. Ikonnikov (1961), which includes pictures of work by Mies van der Rohe, Corbusier, Moretti, Sharon, and Niemeyer.
The dominance of modernism in professional journals is perhaps no surprise, but it is interesting to note that sources aimed at mass audiences also stressed the ‘modern’ character of ‘the second capital’. For example, the leading local newspaper Leningrad Pravda carried, throughout the 1960s, remarkably few images of ‘St Petersburg’ as opposed to ‘Leningrad’. Where represented, old parts of the city were usually shown in ‘revivified’ form: thus, old buildings were permissible when used as a background to the Aurora, ‘flagship of Revolution’, while a piece commemorating the 225th anniversary of the Lomonosov porcelain factory showed not the hallowed halls where the dinner-services of the Tsars had been painted and gilded, but ‘the newest production section in the factory’. In similar vein, a 1969 photograph of St Isaac's Square focused not on the cathedral, but on the car-park in the middle of the area. 22
For the Aurora, see LP 1 May 1968, p. 2; ‘Traditsii masterov farfora’, LP 8 August 1969, p. 4 (the china factory); ‘Leningrad segodnya’, LP 13 September 1969, p. 4 (the car-park). For comparable ‘modern’ images, see V. Shardakov, ‘Tvoi gorod’, LP 25 March 1964, p. 2; ‘U yuzhnykh vorot Leningrada’, LP 18 April 1969, p. 4: is on plans for Victory Square at Srednyaya Rogatka (ploshchad’ Pobedy, chto u Srednei Rogatki) – two towers and avenues of medium-rise. LP 17 Feb. 1970, p. 2 is the Studencheskii gorodok, also a starkly modern scene.
Thus, the pre-Soviet past of the city came across as almost an embarrassment, something to be transcended, or in a term more characteristic of Soviet discourse, ‘reconstructed’, rather than celebrated in its own right. If one worked in a school that had been famous for two centuries, one preferred to emphasise how much things had changed: so, an article on the formerly Lutheran Annenschule, a school with one of the best academic reputations in St Petersburg, published in the Komsomol newspaper Smena in 1961 was structured round a contrast between the 225th anniversary of the school as celebrated in modern Leningrad and the ‘White Guard’ festivities for its bicentenary, as organised by émigrés in Berlin in 1936. The alumni of interest here were not those who had studied in the distant past, but the war heroes and workers’ children who had attended ‘School No. 189’ in the years after 1917 (Barshtak & Malin, 1961).
The ‘monuments’ most heavily promoted in general coverage on the city, as well as in the professional press, were those associated with the Revolution, closely followed by those commemorating the Second World War. Guide books to the city adopted the same principles. Their contents were, for the most part, organised round a hierarchy of revolutionary museums, Lenin memorials, and industrial enterprises. 23
See e.g. Nash gorod Leningrad (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1968), p. 3: ‘Leningrad is known all over the globe: it is one of the largest industrial, scientific, and cultural centres in the Soviet Union, an important sea port on the Baltic, the second largest city in terms of area and population in our Motherland.’ The layout duly proceeds from Lenin memorial places to steam turbine and rubber factories; museums and architectural monuments are listed for the first time on p. 124 (starting with the revolutionary museums).
See e.g. the report of INTERBURO for 1974: ‘Otchet o rabote Leningradskogo Byuro puteshestvii i ekskursii dlya obsluzhivaniya inostrannykh turistov INTURBURO za 1974 g.’, TsGAIPD-SPb. (Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt-Peterburga, the former Party archive), f. 24 [Obkom KPSS], op. 159, d. 16. Leningradskii obkom KPSS. Otdel zarubezhnykh svyazei. Otchety Inturburo, Doma druzhby i mira, Lenoblispolkoma, Lengorispolkoma, obkoma VLKSM i LO Soyuza sovetskikh obshchestv druzhby o rabote za 1974–1975 gody. 27 yanvarya 1975 g. – 23 dekabrya 1975 g. Na 211 listakh, l. 3: ‘Guided by the decisions of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party and the Fifteenth Congress of the Trade Unions on the development of international contacts, and by the decrees of the All-Soviet Central Soviet of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) and the Central Soviet on Tourism and Excusions, the INTURBURO of Leningrad has organised all its work with a focus on perfecting the active propaganda among foreign tourists of our Soviet reality, and the formation of an objective view among the labouring people of foreign countries of our way of life, the conditions of labour and life among the Soviet working people, the true democratism of Soviet society, the wide-ranging rights and multi-faceted activities of Soviet trade unions.’ However, the report also conceded that (l. 7): ‘The foreign tourists visited with great interest the Museum of the History of Leningrad, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Museum of Ethnography’; that a group of tourists from the Federal Republic had complained because the Hermitage was not on their list; and that some Italians had asked to visit Petrodvorets [Peterhof]. There were no indications that the groups would have preferred to visit more factories – indeed, it was hinted that fewer factory visits would have been appreciated (see ‘Otchet INTURBURO o rabote po priemu i obsluzhivaniyu v 1975 godu grupp inostrannykh turistov, posetivshikh Leningrad po linii Tsentral'nogo Soveta po turizmu i ekskursiyam VTsSPS’, TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 24, op. 159, d. 16, ll. 182–199, which includes in its recommendations: ‘2. The number of social events in which a given group is involved should be limited, and a group should not be shown the same kind of things or taken to the same kind of meetings in more than one place.
Revealingly, we were not told in advance that a trip to these museums was planned: instead, we were told that we were going to the beach. As it turned out, this was also true, but the ‘economy with the truth’ indicates our tour organisers’ awareness that our interests and the guiding principles of Soviet propaganda were not well matched.
It cannot be argued, then, that a loving preoccupation with the pre-1917 past was an unalienable fact of life in 1960s and 1970s Leningrad. Rather, celebration of the pre-revolutionary past sat was tempered by denial, elision, and deliberate effacement of this. A drive to conserve and a drive to renew co-existed, often antagonistically, at all phases of the city's history from the late nineteenth century. Indeed, preservationism tended to peak at periods when modernism was most loudly trumpeted. This derived not just from the obvious fact that people started worrying about protecting old buildings when they saw them being torn down (though many of the preservationists of the 1970s and 1980s were later to trace their own radicalisation to the high-profile demolitions of the 1960s). 26
See e.g. Yury Kurbatov's memoir (2005).
This argument is advanced in e.g. Confino and Fritzsche (2002), and (with reference to Russian culture) in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, and in Stroud (2006).
One manifestation of the modernist aesthetic is to toss everything off ‘the steamship of modernity’. A recent renewal of this spirit is the joke posting of tourist postcards showing famous views of the Peterhof palace park on the avant-garde website udaff.ru, which attracted a bracingly sardonic postbag, including one contribution which humorously congratulated the inhabitants of St Petersburg on having in their midst pamyatnik zhope (a monument to the arse-hole). 28
The comment in fact referred to an image of the famous fountain-grotto which had appeared in the montage: see www.udaff.ru.
See Boris Firsov (2009).
The permissive atmosphere of the early 1960s could lead to some astonishing outbreaks of anti-Soviet historicism. A case in point was a discussion on Leningrad television in which a group of writers and littérateurs mocked examples of streets and places that had been renamed in the Communist era. In this sense, Aleksandr Kobak, reminiscing in the television film ‘Twilight of a Big City’ (2006) was right to describe the heritage movement as ‘anti-Communist’. But if this TV discussion was branded impudent by the Party authorities and led to severe trouble for the management of the Leningrad television studio, 30
See Boris Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, St Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2008, Appendix 1, for a transcription of the programme, prefaced by Firsov's own remarks (he was then the director of the studio) about the consequences of showing it.
TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 24, op. 210, d. 2, ll. 26–28.
Shvarts (1956). I consulted the third edition: Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966: here the Kirov quotation appears on pp. 299–300.
Thus, Leningrad passéism was not always subversive. The preservationist movement flourished precisely at periods when it was tolerated by the political establishment, languishing at periods when it was not. The ‘Old Petersburg’ Society, often seen as a straight continuation of pre-revolutionary passéism, as purveyed in ‘World of Art’ circles, for instance, in fact had a more complicated remit than this would suggest. Its declared aims included ‘the popularisation among the broad masses of the idea of city planning and orderliness in appearance [vneshnee blagoustroistvo], and also the discovery of new forms of architecture that arise from the demands of the new way of life’ – an aim that was reflected in the title, ‘Old Petersburg – New Leningrad’, used by the Society in the mid-1920s. 33
For the quotation, see TsGALI-SPb. [Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva Sankt-Peterburga], f. 32, op. 1, d. 4, l. 85.
See e.g. the letter from the chairman of the Podotdel Blagoustroistva of Lensovet, 29 February 1928, TsGALI-SPb., f. 30, op. 1, d. 4, l. 106, in which this person complains that ‘the revolutionary era should be reflected more fully’ in the selection of memorial tablets placed on buildings, and directs the ‘Old Petersburg’ Society to work more closely with the City Museum and with Istpart (the Party History organ – for an excellent history of its work in developing the revolutionary myth, see Frederick Corney (2004).
Another point of importance is that the mainstream direction in Leningrad preservationism was never about protecting the past as a whole. The tone was set in the 1920s, when the efforts of the ‘Old Petersburg’ Society to preserve the city were directed by strong ideas about which layers of history were the most important. It was the neo-classical architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly of major secular public buildings, that occupied the highest place in the Society's hierarchy of values. The constitution of the Society (28 January 1922) stated that it ‘follows the aim of the preservation and resurrection [vosstanovlenie – my emphasis] of the image of the old city, and with this inextricably links the individual traits of the city and new city planning, which should in its development go along new lines that do not introduce disharmony into the unified ensembles of squares, streets, and embankments’. 35
TsGALI-SPb., f. 30, op. 1, d. 4, l. 140.
WAREHOUSE RUINS SPOIL THE EMBANKMENT
Beyond Equality Bridge, on the right bank of the Neva stands, along with its low wooden fences, piles of assorted junk, and clutter of low buildings dating from the era of Catherine II, the Gagarin Warehouses. All these buildings terribly spoil the embankment. On top of that, right here is Peter I's Cottage, a building of historical value.
The Communal Section of Lensovet should put together a plan for the demolition of these warehouses, since a park could be placed on the same spot. 36
TsGALI-SPb, f. 30, op. 1, d. 4, l. 158.
The hierarchy evolved by the ‘Old Petersburg’ Society excluded not just untidy industrial buildings, but also almost any buildings of recent date. For example, while the Society played a very active role in attempts to preserve the Church of the Apostle Paul at Aleksandrovskoe (which was built by A. D. Zakharov, the architect of the Admiralty), it brusquely refused to help the parishioners of the Troitsko–Izmailovsky Cathedral in their struggle to retain a chapel alongside the church: ‘The Society has no intention whatever of taking into its care the Troitsko-Izmailovsky Cathedral, and still less could this apply to the chapel in question, which was built in 1894–95,
TsGALI-SPb., f. 30, op. 1, d. 4, l. 95 (Church of the Apostle Paul); TsGALI-SPb., f. 30, op. 1, d. 30, l. 36.
Thus, a strict system of temporal and spatial values was instituted. Buildings and objects that were worth preserving were those of ‘artistic importance’, and those which were in harmony with their surroundings (a building with contemporary furnishings was ranked higher than one with furnishings of mixed date, a building that was unified in style was considered more valuable than one of mixed styles, and the central unit of conservation planning became the ‘ensemble’). Buildings that had served a noble function (palaces, major public buildings) were ranked higher than those employed for the purposes of trade and industry. And a certain noble elevation (cf. the comment about ‘low’ buildings above – i.e. ones that are not just dedicated to an inferior purpose, but ‘low’ to the ground) was considered desirable. Equally, discrimination was exercised with regard to location: ‘squares, streets, and embankments’ were the focus of attention, and not, for instance, ‘courtyards’ or ‘harbours’. Of the three types of location mentioned by the ‘Old Petersburg’ Society, it was undoubtedly ‘squares’ and still more ‘embankments’ that lay at the heart of the matter, as can be seen not just from the outburst against the Gagarin Warehouses, but also from a list of objects requiring restoration drawn up in 1924, which listed in second place (after the Lazarevskoe Cemetery, which was then in the process of conversion into a pantheon to the famous dead), ‘the restoration to an orderly condition of the granite embankments of the Neva’. 38
TsGALI-SPb. f. 30, op. 1, d. 61, l. 102.
The ‘Old Petersburg’ Society's relations with some sections of the Soviet establishment, for instance the Leningrad State Restoration Workshops and the Committee for the Preservation, Repair, and Restoration of Monuments of Art, History [starina], and Nature, and with Glavnauka (the section of Narkompros, the education and culture commissariat, under whose jurisdiction the Workshops and the Committee fell), were generally excellent. There was considerably more friction with Lensovet, since the condescension of the Society's members towards the city (as opposed to central) authorities was met by suspicions of lack of ideological rectitude on the other side. But the ‘Old Petersburg’ society had a significant input into official preservation policy. An official list of architectural monuments drawn up in the late 1920s shared the emphasis on structures dating from the neo-classical era, ensembles, and architecture along the embankments: among structures assigned to the ‘highest category’ were the Stock Exchange, the Academy of Arts, the Kunstkamera, the ‘Twelve Colleges’, the Winter Palace, and Smol'nyi Monastery, the Senate and the Synod (but not the Menshikov Palace, remodelled as the First Cadet College, a building of suspiciously mixed date). Notably, too, twenty-eight buildings in the ‘highest category’ were classified as ‘civil architecture’, and only 5 as ‘ecclesiastical’. This sense that the six hundred churches of St Petersburg were of relative insignificance applied also to lower categories (in the first category were 57 civil and 20 ecclesiastical, in the second 44 and 12, and in the third and lowest, 64 and 10). The only building where the criterion of ‘artistic value’ could hardly have been deemed to apply was the Peter I Cottage, whose exceptional (in the Society's view) ‘historical significance’ presumably explained its presence in the ‘highest category’ of architectural monument. 39
See TsGALI-SPb., f. 30, op. 1, d. 61.
The Second World War interrupted the reshaping of ‘Socialist Leningrad’ not only in a practical sense (during the Blockade construction, obviously, had to come to a halt), but also in an ideological sense. The damage and destruction wrought to buildings in Leningrad and its surroundings by the ‘fascist invaders’ was crucial to the Soviet propaganda campaign, and the central press (such as the illustrated magazine, Ogonek). carried photographs and reports of the despoliation. In practical terms, the aftermath of the War gave new impetus to restoration work, which in the pre-war years had been at a low ebb. 1943 saw the foundation of integrated state workshops for restoration techniques (though state restoration services as such went back to the 1920s), and the post-war years witnessed a vast expansion of the number of builders and craftsmen who underwent training in these techniques. Their work – involving in many cases the meticulous reconstruction of buildings reduced to burnt-out shells – was regularly publicised to lay readers through articles in newspapers and magazines, and by the different brochures brought out by the State Inspectorate for the Protection of Monuments, the agency managing restoration activities from 1943. 40
See e.g. Kedrinsky, Kolotov, Medersky, and Raskin (1971). This records, for example, that 187 out of 300 monuments on the protected register in 1941 were damaged or destroyed (p. 6), and that the cost of damage ran to 21 billion roubles (p. 7). It pays tribute to the work of members of the Architects’ and Artists’ Union as well as the City Board of Architecture and air-raid wardens in helping with preservation work (p. 5), and also discusses the work done to set up new conservation workshops and increase training for restorers (pp. 7–8). On the last, see also Kedrinsky, Kolotov, Ometov, and Raskin (1983).
‘I am drinking the health first and foremost of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding people of all the peoples comprising the Soviet Union.
I am drinking the health of the Russian people because it has come to deserve special recognition as the leading force in the Soviet Union among all the peoples of the nation. I am drinking the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading force, but because it has a clear mind, a stoical character and a capacity to endure.’ ‘Vystuplenie tovarishcha I. V. Stalina na prieme v Kremle v chest’ komanduyushchikh voiskami Krasnoi Armii’, 24 May 1945. I. Stalin o Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo soyuza. 5th edn., Moscow: 3-ya tipografiya “Krasnii proletarii”, 1952. Also available online at ‘Khronos’, http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/194_dok/194505kreml.html (accessed 9 May 2007).
On the renaming, see Sergei Glezerov (2001); on the fate of the House of Soviets, Pamyatniki arkhitektury Leningrada (2nd edn.; Leningrad: Stroiizdat, 1969), p. 439: ‘After the Second World War, in connection with the preservation of the centre of Leningrad as it had historically been laid down, the use of the building as the House of Soviets ceased to make any sense, and it was handed over to various scientific institutes.’.
See, for example, Pamyatniki arkhitektury Leningrada, p. 439, referring to the ‘mistaken idea of creating a new and excessively grandiose [sverkhgrandioznyi] centre in the southern part of the city’.
The Khrushchev era is regularly seen in histories of the protection of monuments as marking an absolute low. Yet some sense that historical buildings and landscapes should be inviolable remained. In 1957, the year which saw quite a large number of previously protected monuments excluded from the list, an architect involved in the crash housing programme initiated after the decree on ‘architectural excesses’ of 1955, D. Gol'dgor, made the confession to colleagues at Lenproekt, the city planning institute, that he was deeply unhappy about the construction of a tipovoi dom (a functionalist, pattern-book structure) in the centre of the city: ‘Next to Smol'nyi a tipovoi dom has been constructed and I think this was a city planning error of the crudest kind. It's a block on Podgornaya ulitsa and it's just made the whole district look ugly. I feel I'm partly to blame, but in fact I couldn't do anything [to stop it].’ 44
‘Stenograficheskii otchet zasedaniya arkhitekturnoi sektsii Tekhnicheskogo soveta Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo proektnogo instituta Lenproekta: povestka dnya: Obsuzhdenie nomenklatury zhilykh domov s malometrazhnymi kvartirami oborudovannymi vannymi’, 5 March 1957. TSGANTD-SPb., f. 36, op. 1–1, d. 216, l. 19–20.
See ‘Reshenie plenarnogo zasedaniya Tekhnicheskogo soveta Gosudarstvennogo proektnogo institute “Lenproekt”: Protokol No. 35’, 1 August 1961. TsGANTD-SPb., f. 36, op. 1–2, d. 513, l. 1.
Our project was first to be discussed. Everyone who spoke warmly supported it. Then it came to the Chief Architect to conclude the session. And suddenly, like a thunder-clap: ‘I can't allow a building of twenty-five stories right on the bank of the Neva, cheek by jowl with the Peter and Paul Fortress and its golden spire with the angel on the top.’ We were shattered, Sergei Borisovich most of all, of course. And this after we'd heard nothing but enthusiasm the day before (Struzman, 1999). 46
I have discussed these events at length in K. Kelli [=Catriona Kelly], ‘“Ispravlyat’ li istoriyu?” Spory ob okhrane pamyatnikov v Leningrade 1960-kh–1970-kh godov’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas 2 (2009).
Not surprisingly, the Brezhnev years saw preservationist impulses entrenched as never before. 1965 was marked by an outburst of public discussion, including a widely read article in Literaturnaya gazeta by the leading intellectual Dmitry Likhachev, and an entire discussion of the future of Nevsky prospekt in the local newspaper, Leningradskaya pravda. In February 1966, the Learned Council of the Leningrad branch of GIOP, the State Inspection for the Protection of Monuments, registered a break with the policy that had obtained since 1957, and a move to stricter rules on the protection of the built environment:
In the discussion the mistakes that had been made in earlier years with regard to architectural monuments were noted and it was acknowledged that is essential to observe the protection zones [round monuments] more strictly. It was also noted that it was essential not only to preserve the structures that are actually under state protection, but also entire districts that have a specific character and that are interesting in historical terms, and to foster closer contacts between the Learned Council of GIOP and the City Planning Council of Lensovet and its Expert-Technical Council; to promote more appropriate uses for architectural monuments; and to set up protection zones in the settlements surrounding Leningrad [Leningradskie prigorody] and in Kronshtadt.
47
‘Protokol zasedaniya Uchenogo soveta GIOPa Glav. APU Lengorispolkoma’, 14 February 1966, TsGANTD-SPb, f. 386, op. 1–1, d. 13, l. 11.
The document ushered in a period during which increasingly large areas of historic St Petersburg were accorded protection. Control extended not just to the ‘protection zones’ immediately round monuments that had been laid down by national legislation in 1949, 48
‘Kratkaya instruktsiya o poryadke ucheta, registratsii i soderzhaniya pamyatnikov iskusstva (3 marta 1949)’. Okhrana pamyatnikov iskusstva i kul'tury. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973), p. 106. As early as 1924, a ‘protective zone’ (zashchitnaya zona) round monuments had been imposed (see ‘Instruktsiya ob uchete i okhrane pamyatnikov iskusstva, stariny, byta i prirody. 7 yanvarya 1924’, ibid., pp. 43–44.
‘O okhrannykh zonakh pamyatnikov kul'tury, arkhitektury i iskusstva’, Bulleten’ Ispolkoma Lengorsoveta, 5 (1969), p. 5. The local regulations were imposed in response to a decree of the council of Ministers of the RSFSR and ‘temporary instruction’ of 16 December 1966.
From the late 1960s onwards, there was also increasingly strict regulation of the institutions and enterprises that might be located in architectural monuments. In particular, churches, rather than being used as warehouses or factory workshops, were often turned over to cultural institutions such as museums, or converted into concert halls, while former palaces were now more likely to serve as scholarly institutes (particularly in the humanities, which did not require conversion of staterooms into, say, laboratories) than as orphanages or clinics. 50
In the case of palaces, one might compare the fate of the mansion on Furshtadtskaya (ul. Petra Lavrova) turned into a mother and child protection facility in 1921 (in another twist of historical priorities, it is now scheduled for conversion into a luxury hotel), with that of the Kushelev-Bezborodko Palace on nearby Gagarinskaya (ul. Furmanova), which in the 1960s became the Institute of Labour Protection. On churches specifically, see Catriona Kelly and Aleksandra Piir (in preparation).
‘O sokhranenii arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennogo ubranstva pri kapital'nom remonte zdanii’. Reshenie Ispolnitel'nogo komiteta Lengorsoveta ot 7 aprelya 1969 goda No. 294. Byulleten’ Ispolnitel'nogo komiteta Leningradskogo gorodskogo soveta deputatov trudyashchikhsya, 8 (1969), pp. 2–3.
By the mid 1960s, preservation had, therefore, acquired a level of legitimacy that was unprecedented in the Soviet period. 52
It was customary for D.S. Likhachev and others to emphasise the 1920s as a precedent for their efforts, but if one looks back at the documentation preserved in the ‘Old Petersburg’ Society archive, this idea of a Soviet ‘golden age’ is quickly undermined. It was simply expedient to emphasise the virtues of 1920s policy, since this was in tune with the official understanding of the era as a beacon of ‘true Soviet’ ideals, before the Stalinist betrayal of these set in.
The remit of VOOPIiK was far wider than the preservation of architectural heritage. A manifestation of what Yitzhak Brudny (1998), has termed the ‘inclusionary politics’ of the Brezhnev era, it also concerned itself with folklore, literature, painting, and of course also monuments relating to the revolution, the life of Lenin, the war, famous battles in Russian history (see Kozlov 2000)… However, in Leningrad, preservation of the architectural heritage was definitely in first place, judging by the Society's archives.
The facade is supposed to be left unaltered, that is, in the condition in which it was left by alterations carried out in 1873. This is incorrect for the following reasons:
1) in an artistic respect, the remodelling of the facade dating from the 1870s has no artistic value;
2) the preservation of a facade in the spirit of the ‘eclectic’ architecture of the second half of the nineteenth century, given that the house contains interiors dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, carried out in the classical style, will create an impression of stylistic muddle. 54
TsGALI-SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 39, l. 51–52.
At times, efforts to secure ‘harmony’ and ‘decorum’ had an unintentionally comical side. In 1969, the Organising Secretary wrote to the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet with the request that:
an alteration be made to the order passed by the Executive Committee on 20 January 1969 No. 83, ‘On the Construction of Public Lavatories in Leningrad’, with reference to the following matter: No. 5, Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment is a structure of the eighteenth century, albeit remodelled in later times, and it is a monument of architecture under state protection, bearing on its facade a tablet on which its status as a monument is inscribed, as is recorded by the relevant documentation in GIOP. […] Accordingly, the construction of a public lavatory in a building which is under state protection as a monument of national architecture would be haphazard and mistaken, and not suit the building's profile at all. To this day, the Russian people cannot forget the stables that desecrated our unique palaces in the period of the occupation of certain Soviet territories during the Patriotic War. Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment is one of the main thoroughfares in the city. The public lavatory [that already exists as] a separate building on the Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment is not an object spoiling the panorama of the city (it dates from the nineteenth-century). On the days when parades take place on state holidays, this separate building of the public lavatory carries out its assigned function. Notwithstanding the building's nineteenth-century date, the Society [for the Preservation of Monuments] considers that the building could perfectly well be demolished. But should it be?
55
TsGALI-SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 24, l. 33.
The letter was an amusing manifestation of Soviet prudery with reference to ‘the lower bodily stratum’. While the lavatory was accessible year round, the writer considered it essential to ennoble his theme by referring to ‘the days when parades take place on state holidays’, as though urinating on festival days was somehow more acceptable than urinating on ordinary days. More importantly, the argument set out in the letter acted as yet a further manifestation of the emphasis on the sacrosanct character of the embankment, and on the desirability that objects were removed that might ‘spoil’ these (or conversely, constructed in order to beautify these).
All of this was entirely in accordance with the general consensus among city planners at the time. For example, discussions in Lenproekt (the architectural planning institute) during 1961 about the construction of a high-status medium-rise apartment block (later to be known as Dvoryanskoe gnezdo, ‘the nest of gentlefolk’) on the Petrovskaya Embankment not only proposed making radical changes to the presentation of the Peter I Cottage standing immediately in front of the site (‘We propose removing the architecturally uninteresting brick skin and covering it with glass, so that the Cottage itself works on the square, because it is interesting’), but also devoted much attention to the issue of precisely what kind of shop might be legitimately placed in a site overlooking the Neva Embankment. The obvious choice, in terms of planning preferences of the time, was a food shop. But a participant in the discussion vehemently objected to this on grounds of propriety:
A shop here would hardly be appropriate. It would be a dissonant note on the Neva and it shouldn't be done […] if you have to have a food shop, there are plenty of other places to put it. You mustn't put a food shop on the Neva. Whatever next, a paraffin shop! Imagine it, pork knuckles hanging in the window. We're talking about the very centre of the Neva. The Peter I Cottage, the Institute of the Brain – and pork knuckles!
56
TsGANTD-SPb, f. 36, op. 1–1, d. 490, l. 5 (glass case), l. 14 (pork knuckle).
Thus, the mainstream tendencies in planning policy remained in sundry respects conservative. But the fact that so much prominence was given to the need to preserve itself marked a significant change in official policy and ideology. From the late 1960s onwards, Leningrad publishing also gave far more attention to the past of the city. A guide to the ‘monuments of Leningrad’ published in 1980 not only presented the city's sites in strict chronological order, rather than according to a semantic perspective shaped by revolution, but had a purely architectural focus. 57
Pamyatniki iskusstva Sovetskogo Soyuza: Leningrad i okrestnosti. Spravochnik-putevoditel’. Comp. L. S. Aleshina, Moscow: Iskusstvo and Leipzig: Edition, 1980.
As time went on, the historical boom also led to a fragmentation of consensus. Those exploring the history of St Petersburg often wanted to go beyond the ‘Golden Age’ that was hymned in official culture, and turned their attentions to the architecture and culture, now hallowed by the double distance of time and ideological distance, of the so-called ‘Silver Age’. The fascination in the Leningrad intelligentsia with the religious-philosophical movement was only one manifestation of this; others included the interest among literary scholars in the writings of Aleksandr Blok and his circle, Anna Akhmatova, and (more covertly), Nikolai Gumilev. By the 1980s, staff at the Museum of the History of Leningrad were introducing, first to exhibitions, and later to the permanent displays, aspects of pre-revolutionary culture that, in classic Soviet perceptions, were hostile to the new order and ‘petit-bourgeois’ – the traditional Shrovetide and Easter fairs of St Petersburg, the vivid hand-painted shop signs still found in side streets during the early twentieth centuries, and the ‘front parlour’ culture of lace curtains, hand-cranked gramophones, and plush furnishings. 58
See Lur'e and Kobak, ‘Rozhdenie i gibel’. See also Catriona Kelly, interview with a former custodian at the Museum of the History of Leningrad, 7 January 2009 (Oxf/AHRC SPb-09 PF4 CK).
Contemporary interest in the history of architecture followed similar trends, and if anything had an impact on public culture at an earlier stage. If the museum apartment created to commemorate the life of Aleksandr Blok was opened only in 1980, on the poet's centenary, 59
For the documentation appealing for the opening of the museum, see ‘Ob uvekovechenii pamyati Aleksandra Bloka’ (Correspondence between the Board of Management of the Leningrad Section of the Union of Writers, the Culture Section of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party, and Secretary of the Regional Committee B. S. Andreev, March 1975, TsGAIPD f. 24 op. 159 d. 39, l. 3–10. On the opening, see also Catriona Kelly, interview with a former custodian at the Museum of the History of Leningrad, 7 January 2009 (Oxf/AHRC SPb-09 PF4 CK).
TsGANTD-SPb., f. 386, op. 1–1, d. 13, l. 1–2.
Kelli [=Kelly], ‘“Ispravlyat’ li istoriyu?”.
Certainly, the revolutionary history of Leningrad, alongside, of course, the history of the Second World War, remained central to the official and (particularly in the second case) unofficial perception of the city. 62
On the Blockade, see especially Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad. There is so far as I know no comparable study of memorials to the defence of Leningrad, which had much more impact on monument building: see e.g. the 1967 plans for the memorialisation of the ‘Doroga zhizni’ (Road of Life) at Lake Ladoga, TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 25, op. 99, d. 34, ll, 1–12. or the proposal for a memorial to Leningrad journalists killed during the War, ibid., ll. 31–37. With reference to official history, one might note that street naming was generally driven by the post-1917 history of Leningrad.
Among the many people claiming in retrospect that the nickname ‘Piter’ became especially widespread at this time is Joseph Brodsky, in his well-known essay ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’.
Interesting in this regard is the fact that the Leningrad organisation of VOOPIiK often referred to itself solely as ‘The Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture’, as though the preservation of heritage in Leningrad were somehow different from that everywhere else. And it is certainly true that the preoccupation of preservationists in other places recognised as having an architectural heritage with the Old Russian past was on the whole alien to the spirit of preservation in this relatively modern city (Dmitry Likhachev, medievalist and ardent Petersburg preservationist, being an important exception to this trend). Thus, the rediscovery of the Petersburg past represented not just a non-Communist alternative identity, but a rediscovery of local identity – fuelling the latent anti-Moscow feelings that had been suppressed in the Stalin years. The name-change of 1992 – to be followed by a storm of rebranding of almost everything formerly promoted as ‘Len-’ with the new prefix ‘Peter-’, as well as by the restoration of many pre-1917 street names (Pokshishevskaya, 2008, Isachenko, 2008) – represented only the final stage in a wide-ranging and complex process of historical rediscovery that had begun some thirty years earlier.
At the same time, some of the tensions about the appropriate maintenance of heritage that were to explode in the post-Soviet period were also beginning to make themselves felt in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. At the most obvious level, a debate opened up about the different merits of ‘new’ versus ‘old’, as the established Soviet polarisation between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ began to be challenged by celebration of the past for its own sake. In addition, as time went on, the past itself became a subject of controversy. The more obvious the sheer diversity of the history of Leningrad and St Petersburg became, the less that history could be the focus of easy consensus for everyone living in ‘the city on the Neva’. The preservationism of the Soviet period was based on a seductive illusion, a dream of a city of culture where commerce, religion, poverty and other negative manifestations of the past had no place. These integrative ideals were already coming under stress by the 1960s, and by the post-Soviet era, they had lost all pretensions to canonical status. The regret expressed by some professional restorers of the older generation when talking about the past is understandable, but the status of neo-classicism as the sole permissible style could, in a society that is now far more pluralist than in the post-Stalin years, hardly be resurrected. Even radical preservationists now advocate a kind of all-inclusive tolerance of anything built before 1991 – Soviet alongside non-Soviet – rather than arguing that any one architectural or artistic style acts as the only, or even the best, manifestation of ‘the soul of Petersburg’. To put it simply: everyone in St Petersburg knows what should not be built (whether this is ‘concrete boxes’ or banal pastiche), but few have clear ideas about what kind of architecture would best take the city into the twenty-first century.