FROM "COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY MONUMENTS" TO "NATIONAL HERITAGE" The Preservation of Leningrad Churches, 1964-1982

This article addresses the shifting meaning of ecclesiastical buildings in the late Soviet interpretive system and hierarchy of values. The focus is on Leningrad, a city of acknowledged architectural importance, but also one constructed in the relatively recent past, with most important buildings dating from the 1760s and later. The relatively late date at which Leningrad's churches were constructed meant that they did not fit automatically into the hierarchy of values established during and after the Second World War (Great Patriotic War), which placed at the pinnacle churches from the medieval era. Many of the city's churches also did not fit into the hierarchy of architectural values recognised in the city itself from the early twentieth century onwards, which had traditionally emphasised neo-classical buildings created in the period 1780-1820. In the Brezhnev era, partly as a result of the nationwide shifts in attitudes to the Russian Orthodox Church and the evaluation of heritage taking place in the 1960s (marked by the foundation of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments of Heritage and Culture in 1965, and the increasingly accommodating attitude to Orthodox practice evident from the late 1970s), attitudes to church architecture became much more favourable, a circumstance that radically changed the understanding of appropriate city planning, so that churches, once an embarrassment, began to be perceived as crucial to the city's panoramas. This process is significant not only in terms of Leningrad's own development as a city, but in terms of the history of the late socialist city, since the enhanced presence of churches represented neither a "normalisation," internationally speaking, nor a contribution to the specificity of the socialist city that has been so often discussed in Western accounts of the era.