A certain silence settles over a city after a statue hits the ground. Not the absence of noise—the plinth still squats there, a concrete stump, a monument to the void—but the silence of people realizing the ground has shifted under their feet. One day it’s St. George slaying a dragon; the next day St. George was a colonial administrator with a knack for punitive taxation, and the dragon was just a metaphor for the locals. What ends up preserved, what gets pulverized, what earns a little bronze plaque nobody reads: these aren’t curatorial decisions handed down by angels. They’re the aesthetic exhaust of power.

I’m Darya Volkonskaya, and I refuse to pretend beauty floats free of its context. I’ve spent too many years watching regimes launder their reputations through marble, fresco, and folk embroidery to believe that “cultural heritage” is anything but a politically edited highlight reel. The real question isn’t whether politics shapes heritage. It’s who’s holding the chisel, and whose face is getting carved off the frieze.

The Museum as Crime Scene

Walk into any national museum in a former imperial capital and you’ll spot the same taxonomy of theft. Greek vases in London. Benin bronzes in Berlin. The Elgin Marbles sitting in the British Museum like hostages told to smile for the visitors. The official line calls this “universal heritage”—a phrase designed to make you forget that universal usually means “guarded by people with guns and climate control.”

I was in my early twenties when I stood in front of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin and felt something I couldn’t name. It wasn’t awe. It was nausea. The entire structure had been excavated, crated, and shipped from Anatolia by a German engineer who decided that in situ meant “wherever I damn well put it.” The altar is magnificent. That’s the trap. The beauty of the thing makes you complicit in its dislocation. You stand there with your audio guide, learning about the Gigantomachy frieze, while a Turkish archaeologist’s ghost asks why Zeus is fighting giants in a Prussian museum.

Political regimes don’t just steal objects; they steal the right to define what those objects mean. When the Ottomans ruled, the altar was pagan rubble. When the German Empire claimed it, it became the cradle of Western civilization—a genealogical argument in stone. The altar didn’t change. The regime did. And with it, the entire interpretive apparatus swung ninety degrees.

Erasure as a Form of Composition

If you want to understand how a regime reshapes heritage, don’t look at what it builds. Look at what it bulldozes. The Islamic State’s demolition of Palmyra was framed as nihilistic vandalism, and it was. But it was also a deeply coherent act of heritage curation. They understood, with the clarity of the truly fanatical, that ancient stones are never just stones. They’re arguments about who has been here, who matters, who gets to claim continuity with the land.

The West responded with outrage and digital reconstruction projects—as if a 3D model could compensate for the dust. But the West has its own tradition of creative demolition. In 1963, the Pennsylvania Railroad demolished New York’s original Penn Station, a pink-granite Beaux-Arts masterpiece, and replaced it with the current subterranean rat maze. The logic was economic: the air rights were worth more than the station. But the subtext was political. A new regime of corporate modernism was announcing itself. The past was inefficient. Heritage was a balance-sheet liability. The wrecking ball was a manifesto.

Every act of preservation is an act of selection, and every selection is a verdict on what deserves to survive. The Soviet Union was a master at this. After the Revolution, churches became swimming pools, warehouses, museums of atheism. The buildings remained, but their meaning was chemically altered. A fresco of the Last Judgment became wallpaper for a gymnastics class. The regime grasped that you don’t need to destroy a thing to neutralize it. You just need to change what it’s for.

The Folkloric Alibi

There’s a special spot in my personal inferno for the phrase “intangible cultural heritage.” It sounds so gentle, so UNESCO. But it’s often the mechanism by which a regime sanitizes the inconvenient bits of folk culture while amplifying the bits that serve its current agenda. Take a traditional song. If it’s about love and harvests, it gets the festival stage. If it’s about resisting the tsar, resisting the commissar, resisting whoever currently occupies the palace, it gets quietly forgotten. Or worse, it gets “collected” by ethnomusicologists and buried in an archive where no one will hum it again.

I once spent a summer in a village in northern Romania, documenting painted monasteries for a project that never saw print. The locals had their own stories about the frescoes—stories that didn’t match the official pamphlets. They pointed to a faded blue demon in a corner of the Last Judgment and said it was the face of a local landowner who’d taxed them into starvation. The Church said it was a generic sinner. The Ministry of Culture said it was a valuable example of Moldavian artistic syncretism. Everyone was using the same brushstroke to paint different truths.

Heritage is never just the object. It’s the object plus the story you’re allowed to tell about it. And the storyteller is almost always the one who won the last war, the last election, the last purge.

When the Statue Becomes a Mirror

The recent wave of monument toppling—from Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town to Lee in Richmond—wasn’t an attack on history. It was an attack on the curation of history. Those statues weren’t ancient artifacts; most were erected decades or centuries after the figures they depicted, during moments of political reaction. They were put up to send a message: “We’re still in charge.” Pulling them down sent the reply.

The defenders of these statues often reach for the language of preservation. “You’re erasing history,” they say, as if history were a fixed, fragile parchment and not a brawl that never stops. But they’re not really defending history. They’re defending a particular regime’s version of it—a version where bronze men on horses are neutral facts, like weather. They’re not neutral. They were never neutral. They were arguments cast in metal, and every argument eventually meets a counterargument with a rope.

The irony is that toppling a statue is itself an act of heritage-making. The empty pedestal becomes a new monument—to the moment when the argument shifted. In Moscow in 1991, after the failed coup, the crowd pulled down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka. The pedestal remained for years, a void that spoke louder than the bronze ever had. Eventually it got a new sculpture. But for a while, that absence was the most honest piece of public art in Russia.

The Unesco-ification of Everything

UNESCO’s World Heritage list was supposed to be a shield against political vandalism. It has become, in many cases, a branding exercise. Governments lobby fiercely for sites to be listed, not because they want to protect them, but because they want the tourist revenue and the international legitimacy. Once listed, the site becomes a diplomatic asset. Its history gets smoothed into a narrative of universal human achievement, which is just another way of saying: ignore the bloodstains, it’s a masterpiece.

Consider Mostar Bridge in Bosnia. Destroyed in 1993 during the Croat-Bosniak war, rebuilt and UNESCO-listed in 2005. The reconstruction was touted as a symbol of reconciliation. But the bridge’s meaning remains violently contested. For some, it’s a sign of healing. For others, it’s a reconstruction of a pre-war multicultural fantasy that papered over the fact that the city is still ethnically segregated. The Ottoman original was a piece of infrastructure. The new one is political theater. Same arch, different script.

This is the dark joke at the heart of cultural heritage: the more “protected” something is, the more it becomes a screen onto which regimes project their current anxieties and ambitions. The heritage site turns into a politician. It gives speeches it didn’t write.

Conclusion: Heritage Without a Permit

So what do we do? Stop caring about old things? Burn the museums down? No. The point is not to destroy heritage but to refuse the innocence it pretends to have. Every time someone tells you a building, a song, a dance is “part of our heritage,” ask: whose “our”? Who decided? Who paid for the plaque? Who was excluded from the committee meeting? Heritage is a conversation, but for too long it’s been a monologue delivered from a podium. Let’s invite some hecklers.

The next time you stand in front of a monument, don’t just admire the craftsmanship. Feel the weight of all the decisions that kept it standing while something else—something maybe just as beautiful but less politically useful—was carted off to a storeroom or a landfill. Heritage is a survivor’s bias. And we are the survivors, making choices right now about what we’ll pass on and what we’ll let the ivy eat.

I’ll leave you with an image. In a small museum in Tbilisi, there’s a room full of Soviet-era paintings that were removed from public buildings after independence. They’re stacked against the walls, unframed, gathering dust. Lenin addresses a crowd. A tractor triumphs over a wheat field. A worker raises a red flag. They’re not destroyed. They’re not displayed. They’re in limbo—a purgatory of meaning. That room is the most honest heritage site I’ve ever visited. It admits that it doesn’t know what to do with its own past. And that uncertainty is the beginning of real history.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t some cultural heritage genuinely universal and apolitical?

Nothing made by human hands is apolitical. “Universal” heritage usually means a particular Western institution decided it belongs to everyone—which is a political decision in itself. Even the cave paintings at Lascaux are framed by the French state’s narrative of national prehistory. Beauty doesn’t transcend politics; it’s shaped by it.

But if everything is political, doesn’t that justify any regime destroying anything?

Acknowledging that heritage is politically constructed doesn’t mean junking all standards of care. It means dropping the pretense that our standards are handed down from heaven. We can argue, fiercely, about what should be preserved and why—but we should do so knowing full well that we’re making arguments, not discovering eternal truths.

How can an ordinary person push back against political manipulation of heritage?

Be a noisy, inconvenient observer. Read the plaques skeptically. Ask who funded the exhibition. Notice which communities are celebrated in museums and which are treated as anthropological specimens. Support local efforts to tell alternative histories. And don’t let anyone tell you a beautiful object is above criticism. The most beautiful things often hide the ugliest stories.