There’s a specific kind of violence to a new regime renaming a street. Petrograd blinks into Leningrad, Leningrad snaps back to St. Petersburg, and the postman learns to read power’s handwriting. But the postman is the least of it. The real work unfolds in archives, school curricula, restoration budgets—wherever someone in a badly lit office decides what gets called heritage and what gets a wrecking ball dressed up as progress. Heritage isn’t discovered. It’s manufactured, and the factory floor is always political.
The Inventory Is a Weapon
Picture cultural heritage as an inventory list drawn up by whoever won. Every item on that list—every onion-domed church, every Constructivist workers’ club, every folk song transcribed by a nineteenth-century ethnographer with nationalist sympathies—has passed through a filtration system less concerned with beauty than with utility. A tsar funds the restoration of a medieval kremlin because it anchors his claim to divine right. A Soviet commissar bulldozes the same kremlin’s cathedral because the skyline now belongs to the proletariat, not the patriarch. Then a post-Soviet oligarch rebuilds it in gilded replica, and suddenly we’re all supposed to weep at the return of something that was never really lost—just repackaged.
This is not a Russian story. It’s universal, but Russia—with its catastrophic regime changes and its tragicomic relationship to authenticity—makes the machinery visible. When I walk through Moscow, I see a city that’s been heritage-washed so many times the paint is thicker than the brick. The question is never “Is this beautiful?” The question is always “Who needs this to be beautiful right now, and what are they trying to make me forget?”
The Soviet Museum of Atheism, or How to Curate Oblivion
Take St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad. Under the tsars, it was the empire’s largest church, a swollen marble hymn to autocracy and Orthodoxy. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks didn’t just close it; they turned it into the State Anti-Religious Museum. Same space, same mosaics, but now the guided tour explained to workers and peasants that this was the architecture of exploitation. A Foucault pendulum swung from the central dome to demonstrate scientific reason, dangling over the marble floor like a reproach.
Heritage, in that moment, wasn’t erased—it was re-narrated. The building remained a monument, but its meaning got inverted. The regime didn’t need to destroy St. Isaac’s to neutralize its ideological charge; it just changed the label. That’s the sly genius of political heritage management: preservation and destruction are not opposites. They’re two speeds on the same dial.
When the pendulum was removed in the 1990s and the cathedral was returned to the Orthodox Church, the narrative flipped again. Now the building is presented as a timeless sanctuary, a survivor of godless tyranny. But look closely: the restoration deliberately left a few shrapnel scars from the Siege of Leningrad. Those scars are curated. They’re heritage too—just the kind that serves the current story of national resilience. Nothing is accidental. Every chip in the plaster has a press officer.
Unesco and the Gentrification of Memory
The international heritage regime is supposed to float above this grubby nationalism. Unesco’s World Heritage list, with its lofty talk of “outstanding universal value,” imagines itself as a sanctuary from politics—a place where monuments transcend borders and belong to all humanity. A lovely fairy tale, best read to architecture students before they learn how budgets actually work.
In reality, the World Heritage designation is one of the most effective political tools ever invented. A site that makes the list gets instantly revalued—not just culturally, but economically. Tourism spikes, real estate booms, and suddenly the local authorities who once ignored a crumbling citadel are falling over themselves to install interpretive signage and a gift shop selling artisanal honey. The state gets a new brand. Residents get priced out. The monument gets “saved,” which often means embalmed in a version of its history scrubbed clean of anything awkward—no mention of the massacre that happened in the plaza, no plaque for the dissidents imprisoned in the adjacent fortress.
Look at the old city of Baku. When it was inscribed as a World Heritage site, the Soviet-era apartment blocks that had grown up around the medieval core suddenly became a problem. They were “inauthentic,” “intrusive,” “incompatible with the historic fabric.” The Azerbaijani state, flush with oil money and eager to project a post-Soviet identity rooted in a glorious pre-Soviet past, launched a massive clearance program. Thousands of residents got relocated. The architecture that had organically layered itself over centuries was stripped back to a single, preferred layer: the one that looked most convincingly “heritage.” What remained was beautiful, in a sterile, postcard sort of way. What was lost was the city’s actual memory—the messy, inconvenient kind that doesn’t photograph well for the Unesco brochure.
The Bulldozer as Curator
Political regimes don’t just decide what to keep; they decide what to demolish, and demolition is an act of heritage curation every bit as deliberate as museum acquisition. When the Ceaușescu regime razed a third of Bucharest’s historic center to build the Palace of the Parliament, it wasn’t simply destroying heritage—it was creating a new heritage of monumental authoritarian kitsch, and simultaneously erasing the architectural evidence of a multicultural, pre-communist Romania that didn’t fit the nationalist narrative. The empty lots where synagogues and Armenian churches once stood are heritage too: negative heritage, the heritage of absence, which is the hardest kind to get on a register.
In Moscow, the 1930s saw the dynamiting of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to make way for a never-built Palace of the Soviets. The cathedral was heritage under the tsar, an obstacle under Stalin, and then, in the 1990s, a symbol of national rebirth when it was reconstructed in concrete and bronze. The reconstruction is itself a fascinating artifact—a regime change made physical. It’s not a cathedral; it’s a political argument cast in stone, a three-dimensional op-ed about who Russia thinks it is now. I find it hideous and riveting in equal measure, which is probably the intended effect.
The Heritage of the Losers
If heritage is what the victors preserve, then what do we call the things the victors try to forget? I think often of the wooden houses of the Russian North—the elaborate, carved izbas that once lined the rivers of Arkhangelsk and Vologda. Under the Soviets, they were symbols of backwardness, of the peasant past that collectivization was supposed to erase. No one put them on a heritage list. They rotted, burned, or got dismantled for firewood. Today, a few survive as open-air museums, and the Russian state has suddenly discovered their folkloric charm, slapping them on tourism posters for an “authentic” experience about as authentic as a samovar made in a Chinese factory. But the heritage moment for the izba as a living tradition is gone. It was killed by a regime that saw no use for it, and the belated embrace is just taxidermy.
This is the pattern: first neglect, then destruction, then—when the political winds shift—a frantic, sentimental resurrection that’s more about the present regime’s insecurities than the past’s realities. The restored izba is not a peasant house; it’s a monument to the state’s ability to forgive the peasant for having existed. The same logic applies to the Soviet avant-garde architecture now, haltingly, being protected in Moscow. For decades, Melnikov House and the Narkomfin Building were left to decay because they reminded the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of a revolutionary moment it preferred to bury. Now, they’re chic. They’re heritage. The oligarchs want to live in them. The same regime that ignored their leaking roofs is now patting itself on the back for saving them. The cynicism is breathtaking, but at least the buildings get a new roof.
FAQ
What exactly makes heritage “political”?
Heritage is political because it involves choices about what to preserve, restore, and promote—and those choices are always made by people with power, budgets, and an agenda. A medieval fortress can be presented as a symbol of national defense, a tourist attraction, or a site of past atrocities. The label changes depending on who is holding the marker.
Isn’t there such a thing as objectively valuable heritage, beyond politics?
Aesthetic value exists, but it’s never pure. Even the most sublime cathedral was built with money that came from somewhere—taxes, serfdom, colonial extraction—and its survival depends on continuous political and economic support. Calling something “objectively valuable” is often just a way of naturalizing a regime’s preferences.
Can communities reclaim their heritage from political manipulation?
Sometimes, yes. Grassroots movements, local historians, and independent artists can wrest the narrative away from the state, at least for a while. But these efforts are fragile and often co-opted. The moment a community succeeds in getting a site protected, the state usually swoops in to manage it—and the management comes with its own strings attached.
Why does any of this matter beyond academic debate?
Because heritage determines who gets to belong. When a regime decides that your neighborhood’s mosque or your grandmother’s wooden house is not “heritage,” it’s telling you that your history doesn’t count. That has material consequences: demolition, displacement, cultural erasure. Heritage policy is always, at its core, a policy about people.
The Future Is a Heritage Site
I’m not arguing against preservation. I’m arguing against innocence. Every time we walk into a beautifully restored palace or a lovingly curated folk museum, we should ask: Who paid for this? Whose story is being told? Whose story is being bricked over? The answers are never comfortable, but comfort isn’t the point. The point is to see heritage for what it is—a battlefield, not a museum—and to recognize that the monuments we polish today are the arguments we’ll have with our grandchildren. If we’re lucky, they’ll have the good sense to be furious with us.