Heritage is never just about old stones. It’s a contract between the living and the dead, and the pen is always held by whoever’s in power. In the post-Soviet space, that pen has passed from commissars to oligarchs, from party secretaries to populist strongmen, each scribbling out the names they don’t like and writing in their own. The result is a landscape where a nineteenth-century merchant’s mansion can vanish overnight for a glass-box trade center, while a brutalist concrete bus station suddenly gets declared a “monument of national significance” because it props up a new political story. This isn’t preservation. It’s selective memory, sharpened into a weapon.

I’m Darya Volkonskaya, and on zhivoderam.net I track how aesthetics and power co-produce each other across Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Today, we’re examining the machinery that decides what gets called cultural heritage—and what gets called rubble. The process is never neutral. It’s a slow, often violent, reordering of the visible world to match a regime’s self-image.

The Registry as a Weapon: Who Decides What’s a Monument?

In Russia, the state register of cultural heritage objects reads less like a scholarly inventory and more like a kill list. Inclusion promises protection; exclusion is a death sentence. The Federal Law “On Objects of Cultural Heritage” grants the Ministry of Culture and regional authorities the power to add or remove sites. The criteria—historical, architectural, artistic, scientific, memorial value—sound objective. But value is a political construct. A constructivist workers’ club from the 1920s can be dismissed as “low-value” by a commission stacked with appointees who prefer neoclassical pomp. A wooden church in the Russian North, built without nails by peasants, can be left to rot because the regional governor would rather fund a gilded cathedral that photographs well for Instagram.

The very term “architectural monument” is a product of the nineteenth-century nation-building project. In the Soviet period, the protected list mirrored the official historical narrative: revolutionary landmarks, Lenin’s hideouts, palaces turned into museums for the proletariat. After 1991, the list became a battlefield. New states rushed to de-Sovietize their heritage registers, sometimes literally chiseling hammers and sickles off facades to qualify a building for protection under a new, nationalist rubric. In Ukraine, the 2015 decommunization laws mandated the removal of Soviet-era monuments and symbols from public space, but they also triggered a messy re-evaluation of what counted as “local heritage” versus “occupier propaganda.” A constructivist housing block in Kyiv could lose its protected status not because of its architectural merit, but because of the plaque on its wall.

This isn’t a flaw in the system; it’s the system’s primary function. Heritage registers are tools of narrative control. They tell us which pasts are worthy of a future. In Belarus, the Lukashenko regime has quietly removed from the register buildings associated with the 2020 protest movement, while fast-tracking protection for sites that reinforce the official myth of the Great Patriotic War. The building at 17 Oktyabrskaya Street in Minsk—a former café that became a hub for opposition activists—wasn’t architecturally remarkable. But its delisting was a political act, a bureaucratic exorcism. The message: this place never mattered, and neither did what happened here.

UNESCO and the Geopolitics of the World Heritage Label

If national registers are the tactical weapons, the UNESCO World Heritage list is the strategic arsenal. The nomination process is supposed to be a rigorous, expert-driven evaluation of “outstanding universal value.” In practice, it’s a diplomatic negotiation where cultural prestige is traded for political loyalty. The post-Soviet space offers a gallery of case studies. The Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of survey triangulations stretching across ten countries, was inscribed in 2005 as a testament to scientific cooperation. Yet its nomination was also a soft-power exercise, binding the Baltic states, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine into a shared European narrative at a moment of post-enlargement tension.

More recently, the Kremlin has pushed for the inscription of sites that reinforce its civilizational claims. The nomination of the “Petroglyphs of Lake Onega and the White Sea” was accelerated, while the transnational bid for the “Cultural Landscape of the Curonian Spit” became a delicate dance between Russia and Lithuania. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s successful emergency inscription of Odesa’s historic center in 2023, under the threat of Russian bombardment, was a diplomatic counterstrike. UNESCO’s accelerated procedure, designed for sites in “imminent danger,” became a tool of symbolic defense. The label didn’t stop missiles, but it reframed the destruction as a crime against humanity’s shared inheritance. Heritage here isn’t a passive relic; it’s an active combatant.

Ruins by Design: The Politics of Neglect

Not all heritage destruction arrives with a wrecking ball. In the post-Soviet world, the most effective method is often strategic neglect. A building is left to rot. The roof leaks, the floors buckle, the walls crack. After a decade, the structure is declared unsafe. Demolition becomes a public safety measure, not a political act. This is how cities are cleansed of unwanted history without anyone signing an order.

Take the Narkomfin Building in Moscow, a masterpiece of constructivist architecture. For years, it was allowed to decay, its innovative communal spaces gutted, its hanging gardens reduced to dust. The state had no use for a building that embodied a utopian vision of collective living. Only after a private developer with ties to the political elite acquired the site did restoration begin—transforming it into luxury apartments. The building was saved, but its social meaning was erased. The form remains; the ideology is embalmed.

In Central Asia, the neglect is often more brutal. In Tashkent, the post-Soviet reconstruction of the city center involved the systematic demolition of mahalla neighborhoods, traditional residential quarters with a complex social fabric. These weren’t protected as heritage because they didn’t fit the new national narrative of a modern, independent Uzbekistan. Instead, the regime built broad boulevards and gleaming white marble-clad buildings, a Potemkin village of state power. The mahallas that survived were those that could be repackaged as tourist-friendly “old towns,” their living communities replaced by craft shops and teahouses for foreigners.

The Reconstruction Paradox: Building a Past That Never Was

Sometimes the most aggressive form of heritage erasure is reconstruction. When a site is rebuilt, it’s not the original that stands but a copy, a political argument rendered in brick and stucco. The rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow is the archetype. The original was dynamited in 1931 to make way for the Palace of the Soviets, a Stalinist skyscraper that never materialized. The site became a swimming pool, the world’s largest open-air heated pool, a surreal monument to Soviet leisure. Then, in the 1990s, the cathedral was resurrected as a symbol of national redemption, a marble-clad assertion that the Soviet experiment was a detour, not a destination. The new cathedral isn’t a restoration; it’s a negation. It says: the twentieth century was a mistake, and we have corrected it.

This logic now operates across the region. In Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the government has built a “cultural heritage park” filled with replicas of ancient monuments, a Disneyfied history that erases the complex, multi-ethnic reality of the Silk Road. In Grozny, Chechnya, the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque and the surrounding “Grozny City” development present a vision of Chechen identity that is entirely subservient to the ruling family, with no trace of the wars that destroyed the city or the Soviet modernism that preceded them. Reconstruction is the most effective form of forgetting.

The Market Logic: Heritage as a Luxury Brand

In the post-Soviet condition, heritage isn’t only a political tool but an economic asset. The “heritage industry” has become a vehicle for gentrification, tourism, and real estate speculation. In cities like St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, and Lviv, the historic center is a stage set for boutique hotels, hipster coffee shops, and souvenir markets. Protecting the facade often masks the hollowing out of the interior—both literally, as buildings are gutted and rebuilt behind preserved front walls, and metaphorically, as the social life of the neighborhood is displaced by capital.

This process isn’t unique to the region, but it takes on a particular flavor in societies where property rights are fragile and the state is a predator. In Baku, the “Old City” is a UNESCO site, but its restoration has been accompanied by the demolition of less picturesque, but socially vital, Soviet-era housing. The new heritage economy creates a two-tier city: a sanitized, Instagrammable core for tourists and investors, and a periphery where the displaced population is pushed. Heritage becomes a luxury brand, and the brand must be protected from the people who actually live there.

The irony is sharp. The Soviet Union, for all its crimes, had a strong system of heritage protection, rooted in a genuine, if ideologically filtered, commitment to public education and collective memory. The post-Soviet market has turned heritage into a commodity, and the authoritarian state has turned it into a propaganda tool. The result is a landscape of simulation, where the past is whatever the powerful need it to be.

FAQ: Heritage, Power, and the Post-Soviet Condition

Why do political regimes care so much about cultural heritage?

Cultural heritage is a material anchor for collective memory. By controlling which buildings, sites, and objects are protected, a regime controls the physical evidence of the past. This allows it to legitimize its own rule, delegitimize its opponents, and construct a national narrative that serves its interests. In the post-Soviet space, where national identities are still contested and borders have shifted, heritage is a key battlefield in the war over who belongs and who does not.

How does the destruction of heritage function as a political act?

Destruction is the most visible form of heritage politics. When a regime demolishes a monument, it is not just removing stone; it is erasing a symbol. The demolition of Soviet war memorials in the Baltic states, the toppling of Lenin statues in Ukraine, and the destruction of Chechen cemeteries by Russian forces are all acts of symbolic violence. They send a message: your history does not count, your dead do not matter, and your identity has no place in the future we are building.

What role does the international community play in heritage protection in the region?

UNESCO and other international bodies can provide a counterweight to state power, but their influence is limited. Inscription on the World Heritage List can mobilize international attention and resources, but it can also provoke nationalist backlash. In Russia, the state has increasingly asserted “sovereign heritage,” arguing that international norms do not apply to its treatment of cultural sites. The international community’s response is often reactive, limited to statements of concern after destruction has already occurred.

Can heritage be reclaimed by communities against the will of the state?

Yes, but it is difficult and dangerous. Grassroots heritage movements have emerged across the region, from the defenders of the constructivist “House of the Ship” in Ivanovo to the activists protecting the Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Azerbaijan. These movements use social media, crowdfunding, and legal challenges to resist state-led destruction. However, they operate in environments where civil society is under constant pressure, and their successes are often temporary. The most effective resistance is not just about saving buildings, but about building alternative narratives that challenge the regime’s monopoly on memory.

What Comes Next: The Archive as Resistance

If the state controls the official heritage list, then the counter-archive becomes a site of resistance. Across the post-Soviet space, independent researchers, artists, and activists are building shadow heritage registers: digital archives of demolished buildings, oral histories of erased communities, 3D scans of monuments under threat. These projects don’t have the force of law, but they create a parallel record, a memory of what was lost and a resource for future reckoning.

On zhivoderam.net, I’ll continue to document these struggles, not as a neutral observer but as someone who believes that aesthetics and power are inseparable. The fight over heritage is a fight over the future. What we choose to preserve, and what we allow to be destroyed, will shape the world our children inherit. The question isn’t whether we will have a past, but whose past it will be.

Next in this series: the aesthetics of the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, and how a poisoned landscape becomes a monument to state violence.