It starts, the way these things always seem to, with a statue. Not the obvious one—not yet—but something smaller and stranger: a bronze Lenin head, severed clean at the neck, sitting in a Kyiv antique shop alongside a samovar and a pile of Soviet-era postcards. Fifty bucks. The shopkeeper shrugs. “Sentimental value,” he tells me, and the phrase just floats there, half punchline, half indictment. Who the hell is sentimental for Lenin anymore? And who gets to decide?

Heritage is never only about the past. It’s a live battlefield, a way of saying this counts and this doesn’t. Regimes know this in their bones. They go for the monuments first—not because they’re secret art historians, but because they understand that controlling the story of what’s beautiful, what’s sacred, what’s ours, is the fastest route to controlling memory itself. I’ve been chewing on this a lot lately, watching the dispatches from Bucha and Mariupol, scrolling past shattered museums and streets renamed overnight. The destruction isn’t random. It’s a grammar.

Heritage as an alibi

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, one of the new authorities’ first moves was to “protect” the archaeological site of Chersonesus. Vladimir Putin showed up, wandered among the Greek ruins, and delivered a sermon about the “sacred” nature of the land, the baptism of Prince Vladimir, the unbroken chain of Russian civilization. It was a clinic in heritage laundering. Dress up an annexation as a rescue mission for ancient stones, and suddenly you’ve got a moral gloss. Who could object to saving antiquities? Anyone paying attention to the simultaneous erasure of Crimean Tatar cultural sites—mosques, cemeteries, libraries—less telegenic, less helpful to the imperial storyline. That’s who.

This is the double move: hoist one set of objects into the “heritage” spotlight while actively degrading another. It isn’t hypocrisy; it’s method. Heritage isn’t a neutral category. It’s a permission slip. When the Assad regime shelled the old city of Homs, that wasn’t a failure to read UNESCO’s guidelines. It was a calculation: flattening Sunni and Christian neighborhoods was a way of announcing that their past didn’t count, that their presence was always provisional. The stones were witnesses, and witnesses need to be silenced.

The curatorial coup

Sometimes the violence is quieter. A tweaked museum label, a deaccessioning, a “reorganization” of the permanent collection. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government has turned the Hungarian National Gallery into a delivery system for a very specific flavor of national nostalgia. Modernist works that used to command the walls are now in storage; nineteenth-century history paintings glorifying the “great Hungarian plain” and the nobility have multiplied like damp. No press release announced the purge. The walls just changed color, and the story of what Hungarian art is supposed to be changed with them.

Call it the curatorial coup: the slow, bureaucratic redefinition of value. Less photogenic than a toppled statue, maybe, but potentially more effective. When Poland’s Law and Justice party took power, it stuffed the boards of cultural institutions with loyalists and bankrolled new museums—the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, the Museum of the Poles Who Saved Jews—that foregrounded a narrative of heroic victimhood. The exhibits are often moving, beautifully designed, rigorous in their details. And still, the cumulative effect is a narrowing of the imaginative horizon. You walk out knowing exactly who the heroes are, and exactly who the villains are, and all the complexity of the past has been buffed into a fable. Is that heritage, or is it propaganda with nice lighting? The line is blurrier than we like to think.

The statue wars and their discontents

We’ve all seen the clips: Edward Colston splashing into Bristol Harbor, Robert E. Lee’s pedestal in Richmond tagged with “BLM,” Lenin monuments across Ukraine yanked down with ropes and roaring crowds. The standard Western liberal response is a queasy cocktail of excitement and anxiety. Excitement because oppressive symbols are falling; anxiety because, well, isn’t this mob rule? What about preserving history?

But the question’s badly framed. Nobody’s erasing history. History is what happened; statues are decisions about what to honor. A slave trader’s statue isn’t a history lesson—it’s a value judgment cast in bronze. The people pulling it down aren’t vandals; they’re participating in a very old tradition of renegotiating public space. The real erasure happened long before, when the city chose to hoist Colston above the thousands of people his ships destroyed. That was a political act, too, just one that wore a top hat and called itself “civic pride.”

Regimes get this perfectly. When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, the world was horrified—rightly—at the loss of irreplaceable art. But the Taliban wasn’t acting out of pure ignorance. They were making a point about what heritage means when you reject the whole framework of “world culture” as a Western imposition. The Buddhas weren’t just statues; they were evidence of a pre-Islamic past the regime wanted to annihilate. The act was monstrous, but it wasn’t senseless. It was a darkly coherent argument about who owns the past.

When heritage becomes a weapon

In Russia’s war on Ukraine, the targeting of cultural sites has been systematic. As of early 2025, UNESCO has verified damage to over 300 cultural sites in Ukraine—churches, museums, libraries, historic buildings. The Mariupol Drama Theatre, marked with the word “children,” was bombed. The Skovoroda Museum, dedicated to the eighteenth-century philosopher, took a missile hit. These aren’t collateral damage. They’re messages. Russia is saying: your past isn’t real, your culture is derivative, your heritage is a mistake we’re correcting.

And yet Ukraine has responded with a ferocious reclamation of its own heritage. The “decommunization” process that began in 2015 kicked into overdrive after the full-scale invasion. Streets named for Pushkin became streets named for Ukrainian poets. Soviet war memorials were dismantled or recontextualized. This isn’t, as some Western commentators fret, “cancel culture.” It’s survival. When a regime tries to erase you, asserting your own heritage is a form of self-defense. The question isn’t whether politics should influence heritage. The question is whose politics, and to what end.

Aesthetics is not a refuge

I get told, often, to separate art from politics. That beauty is its own kingdom, that a painting or a building can be appreciated “on its own terms.” This is a fantasy, and a dangerous one. The terms are always set by somebody. The Alhambra isn’t beautiful by accident; it’s the product of a Nasrid dynasty that was deep in political negotiation with Christian kingdoms. The beauty of Leni Riefenstahl’s films isn’t incidental to their fascism—it’s the engine of it. Pretending otherwise is willful naivety, or worse, complicity.

What we call heritage is always a selection, an argument, a bid for permanence in a world that is fundamentally impermanent. The regimes that reshape it aren’t anomalies; they’re the rule. The anomaly is the brief, fragile moment when we convince ourselves that culture floats above the fray. It never has. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can start asking sharper questions. Not “should politics be kept out of museums?” but “whose politics are already in there, and what are they asking us to forget?”

The Lenin head in the Kyiv antique shop is still there, I imagine. Maybe someone bought it and melted it down. Maybe someone bought it and stuck it on a mantelpiece as a conversation piece, a relic of a dead empire. Either way, the meaning has changed. That’s the only constant. Heritage isn’t a treasure chest; it’s a knife that changes hands. The only question is who’s holding it, and where they mean to cut.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is all heritage politically constructed?

Yes, but that doesn’t make it fake. The political process of selecting, preserving, and interpreting objects is real and has real effects. The point isn’t to dismiss heritage as a sham, but to ask who’s doing the selecting and why. A cathedral can be a masterpiece of Gothic architecture and a monument to the power of the medieval Church; those things aren’t separate.

What is the difference between heritage and history?

History is the study of the past in all its complexity. Heritage is the use of the past for present purposes. History asks “what happened?” Heritage asks “what should we remember, and how should we feel about it?” The two are related, but heritage is always selective in a way that history, at its best, tries not to be.

Can heritage be reclaimed by communities without state power?

Absolutely, and often the most vital heritage work happens outside official channels. Community archives, oral history projects, guerrilla memorials, digital platforms—all can assert alternative versions of the past. But these efforts exist in tension with state-sponsored heritage, and they’re always vulnerable to being suppressed, co-opted, or starved of resources.

Why do regimes target cultural sites during war?

Because culture isn’t a side issue; it’s the infrastructure of identity. Destroying a library or a museum is a way of attacking a community’s sense of continuity and legitimacy. It’s a form of violence that outlasts the immediate physical damage, sowing despair and dislocation for generations.