The day the Soviet Union collapsed, my grandmother took a hammer to the plaster Lenin bust that had loomed over her school’s entrance hall for four decades. It wasn’t some grand political gesture, though there was plenty of that swirling around. She acted because the director announced the statue was being carted off “for restoration.” She knew, with the marrow-deep cynicism of someone who’d survived three famines and two purges, that “restoration” meant “warehouse to nowhere.” If the thing was going to disappear, she wanted the satisfaction of watching it shatter. What she couldn’t have guessed was that thirty years later, a hipster bar in Moscow would pay ten thousand rubles for a genuine Soviet-era Lenin bust to mount ironically above its cocktail station. The relic was reborn—not as heritage, but as décor. The regime had changed; the aesthetics had just shape-shifted.

We like to pretend that cultural heritage is a gentle, scholarly pursuit—a slow pileup of Important Things that belong to all of us. But heritage isn’t found. It’s made, and remade, by whoever’s holding the chisel. Every political regime, whether it wraps itself in velvet or khaki, understands this in its bones. The question is never “What should we preserve?” It’s “What story do we need these objects to tell, and who has to be scrubbed out to make the telling smooth?”

The Bulldozer as Curator

In 2001, the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The world gasped, and rightly so. But the gasp was selective. When the Baathist regime drained the Mesopotamian marshes in the 1990s—wiping out a 5,000-year-old wetland culture, its reed houses, its water buffalo, an entire living ecosystem—the West barely shrugged. The first destruction was ideological theater: a photogenic offense against stone. The second was a slow, muddy erasure of people. Both were curation by demolition. The Buddhas were too tall, too pagan, too visible. The Marsh Arabs were too Shia, too rebellious, too inconveniently alive. One regime wanted to purify the landscape of a false idol; the other wanted to purify it of a breathing population. The methods diverged, but the logic underneath was identical: the past is territory to be conquered, and its monuments are hostages.

This isn’t some pathology of the East, an Orientalist fever dream of fanatics with explosives. The West just prefers its erasures to come with a patina of taste. When Robert Moses rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through working-class neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s, he wasn’t just laying asphalt. He was conducting an aesthetic purge. The dense, messy, Jewish and Black neighborhoods he bulldozed weren’t considered “heritage.” They were blight. The fact that some of those blocks held synagogues, community gardens, generations of oral history didn’t register because the regime—a modernist technocracy, in this case—had decided heritage looked like a parkway, not a pushcart. The highway itself became the monument, a sleek concrete rebuke to the human clutter it replaced.

The Museum as a Crime Scene

If the bulldozer is the blunt instrument, the museum is the scalpel. It doesn’t destroy objects; it reclassifies them. A looted Benin Bronze sits in the British Museum and becomes “world art.” A sacred bundle, stolen from a massacred Native American tribe, becomes an “ethnographic specimen” at the Smithsonian. The violence that delivered these objects into the collection gets carefully edited out of the wall text. Instead, we get a placard about craftsmanship, about the generous loan from a Victorian collector, about the “mystery” of the ritual. The regime that did the looting—colonialism—is never named as the curator-in-chief. The museum presents itself as a neutral safe house, a place where objects escape the chaos of politics and enter the serene sphere of aesthetics. This is, of course, the most political act of all: to declare oneself apolitical is to naturalize one’s own power.

Take the Pergamon Altar, that monumental Greek temple ripped from Anatolian soil and reassembled in Berlin. The German state didn’t just acquire a building; it acquired the right to narrate antiquity. To walk through the Pergamon Museum is to absorb a silent argument: that Western civilization has a natural, unbroken line from Athens to Berlin, and the Ottoman Empire was just a forgettable custodian. The fact that the altar was extracted under a murky deal with a regime that had no moral right to sell it is a footnote. The regime that holds the object writes the origin story. That’s why the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, with its ghostly white plaster casts standing in for the Parthenon Marbles still held in London, is such a brilliant act of counter-curation. It doesn’t just demand the marbles back; it makes their absence the exhibit. It forces a visitor to see the British Museum not as a treasury, but as a wound.

Revolutionary Kitsch and the Nostalgia Trap

Regimes don’t just erase; they also produce. And what they produce in abundance is kitsch. Soviet heritage was never only about onion domes and Fabergé eggs; it was about the tractor factories, the Palace of the Soviets (which mercifully never got built), the statues of the worker and the kolkhoz woman straining heroically toward a future that never arrived. After 1991, much of this was gleefully torn down. But in the past decade, something odd has crept in. A selective nostalgia has settled. You can now buy Soviet-themed ice cream, visit a Stalinist bunker turned into a trendy restaurant, and pose for selfies with bronze Lenins that were left standing precisely because they generate tourist revenue. The regime of the present—authoritarian capitalism with a heavy dose of imperial longing—has repackaged the detritus of its predecessor. Not all of it, mind you. The Gulag barracks aren’t being converted into boutique hotels. The mass graves aren’t on the tour bus route. The heritage that gets preserved is the stuff that can be sanitized into an aesthetic: brutalist chic, retro-futurism, the grim allure of totalitarian design. The suffering is scraped away, leaving only the clean lines of a propaganda poster.

This is the darkly funny part. The very people who would have been shot for hoarding a portrait of Trotsky now sell his image on tote bags at the flea market. The regime change didn’t liberate history; it just opened a new franchise. The past is a buffet, and we’re invited to pile our plates with whatever tastes least of the truth.

Intangible Heritage and the Refusal to Die

So far I’ve talked mostly about objects and buildings, the hard stuff of heritage. But the ugliest battles are often over the soft stuff: language, music, food, ritual. A regime that wants to erase a people rarely starts with their statues; it starts with their verbs. Franco’s Spain tried to beat Catalan out of children. Turkey has spent a century denying that Kurdish is a language at all, calling it a “mountain dialect” that doesn’t merit a classroom. In both cases, the state grasped that a population unable to name its own past in its own tongue becomes a population that can be absorbed, or at least managed. The designation of “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO is a direct response to this kind of linguisticide, but it’s a flimsy weapon. A UNESCO listing doesn’t stop a secret policeman from kicking down a door. It just makes the kick feel a little more globally observed.

And yet, the soft stuff is also the most resilient. A recipe survives a famine. A lullaby survives a massacre. The very fragility of intangible heritage makes it slippery; it can hide in a grandmother’s kitchen, in the rhythm of a dance step taught in secret. The regime can bulldoze the village, but it can’t bulldoze the memory of how to make the village’s bread. This is the terrifying and hopeful truth: heritage is ultimately a human act, not a stone one. The state can build a museum, but it can’t make people love what’s inside it. And it can’t stop people from loving what it has tried to burn.

Who Is the “We” in World Heritage?

The language of heritage is always a language of “we.” “Our shared past.” “Our common humanity.” But every “we” is a lie of omission. When ISIS blew up the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, the Western media wept for “our” lost heritage. Whose “our”? The Syrian family crammed into a refugee camp in Jordan might mourn the temple, or they might mourn their own bombed-out apartment block first. The temple became a global tragedy because it was already classified as a universal treasure. The apartment block was a private grief, unworthy of a plaque. The regime of international heritage law is itself a political structure, dominated by Western institutions and Western notions of what makes a thing valuable. A cathedral is always more heritage-listed than a souk. A tomb is more sacred than a living market. We’ve built a hierarchy of grief, and it maps neatly onto colonial hierarchies of worth.

So where does this leave us? Not, I hope, in a posture of cynical despair. Recognizing that heritage is political isn’t a reason to abandon it. It’s a reason to fight for it more honestly. Next time you stand in front of a glass case and read a placard about a “ceremonial object from an unknown tribe,” ask yourself: what regime made this object “unknown”? What violence is buried in that passive voice? Heritage is not a treasure chest. It is a battlefield. And the dead are still being counted.