There’s a particular brand of piety that clings to the phrase “cultural heritage.” It rolls off the tongue at UNESCO galas and in the brochures of ministries of culture with the soft, sanctified hush of a prayer. We’re meant to picture sun-bleached temples, folk dances performed in embroidered vests, the crumbling arches of a forgotten empire. But heritage, my darlings, is never just a collection of old things. It’s a guest list—a curation performed by whoever happens to be holding the velvet rope at the door. And the bouncers change with every regime.

The Museum as a Safe, Not a Storyteller

Walk into any national museum in a former Soviet republic and you’ll feel it immediately: the ghost of the five-year plan lurking behind the glass cases. The narrative is linear, triumphant, suspiciously tidy. In Belarus, the Great Patriotic War museum in Minsk has been rebuilt, expanded, and lacquered with so much state sentiment that the actual horrors of 1941–1945 become a backdrop for a morality play about resilience, loyalty, and the eternal wisdom of the current president. The objects on display—letters, rifles, a child’s singed shoe—are real. But their arrangement is a political argument dressed in the neutral tones of conservation.

Here’s the first sleight of hand: heritage is framed as preservation, when it’s really production. A regime doesn’t simply protect the past; it manufactures a version of it that justifies the present. The Romanovs did it with onion domes and Fabergé eggs, the Soviets did it with constructivist monuments and tractor factories, and the post-Soviet oligarchies do it by restoring cathedrals while letting the communal apartments rot. Each era picks its icons, and the unpicked are left to molder in the archives, or worse, in plain sight.

Ruins That Speak the Right Language

Consider the strange afterlife of socialist-era memorials in the Baltic states. After 1991, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania faced a curatorial crisis: what to do with the bronze soldiers, the heroic workers, the concrete fists thrusting toward a discredited sky? Some were toppled, dragged to sculpture parks on the outskirts of town where they now stand like embarrassed uncles at a wedding. Others were left in place but re-signified, stripped of their plaques, treated as mere “aesthetic objects” of a bygone style. The Tallinn Bronze Soldier, a Red Army memorial, became an international diplomatic incident in 2007 when Estonian authorities relocated it from the city center to a military cemetery. The riots that followed were not about a statue; they were about who controls the symbolic center of the city—and thus, who owns the story.

And here’s the second trick: regimes don’t merely add to heritage; they subtract, silence, and rebrand. The same process happens in reverse when authoritarian nostalgia takes hold. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government has poured millions into reconstructing historic castles and squares in a faux-imperial style that erases the twentieth century almost entirely. The goal is to create an unbroken, pre-communist, Christian-national timeline where the interruptions—fascism, socialism, 1956—become minor stains on a glorious wall hanging. It’s heritage as Photoshop, not archaeology.

The Market’s Invisible Hand in the Archive

Of course, it would be a grave mistake to think only overtly political regimes reshape heritage. The market is a regime too, and its methods are more insidious because they smell of nothing at all. Look at the “revitalization” of historic city centers from Lisbon to Lviv. Artists’ squats, family-run bakeries, and the chaotic vernacular of centuries are replaced by heritage-branded luxury apartments and artisanal gelato shops. The buildings are preserved—their facades scrubbed, their wrought-iron balconies reinforced—but the life inside them is evicted. The heritage object becomes a prop for Airbnb photo shoots. The city becomes a museum of itself, and the former inhabitants are cast as extras who forgot their lines.

In Tbilisi, the government’s “New Tiflis” project has seen the demolition of entire historic courtyards—the famous Italian courtyards with their shared balconies and grapevines—to make way for glass-and-steel hotels that promise “authentic Georgian hospitality.” The irony is so thick you could bottle it and sell it in the duty-free shop. The intangible heritage—the neighborly shouting, the polyphonic singing drifting from an open window, the way a whole community lived in a semi-public space—is annihilated so that the image of heritage can be sold to tourists. The state and the developer are co-authors of a new, sterilized past.

When the People Become the Exhibit

UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list was meant to be a corrective to the stone-and-mortar bias of traditional preservation. It covers practices: oral traditions, rituals, festivals, crafts. But even here, the political hand is heavy. A government must nominate a practice; a government must define its boundaries, its practitioners, its “authentic” form. Suddenly, a living, messy, evolving tradition becomes a fixed asset on a national balance sheet. The Turkish coffee fortune-telling, the Armenian lavash baking, the Chinese shadow puppetry—all lovely, all deserving of celebration. But once listed, they’re subject to a new kind of political management. Tourism ministries set up demonstration villages. Authenticity becomes a certification, and practitioners who deviate from the state-approved version risk losing their status, their funding, their visibility.

The dark comedy here is that heritage, which ought to belong to communities, is systematically alienated from them through the very act of official recognition. The regime—be it a nation-state, a regional authority, or a global body like UNESCO—becomes the arbiter of what counts and what does not. A folk song that criticizes the government will never make the list. A dance that was once part of a fertility ritual gets cleaned up, costumed, and performed for dignitaries, its bawdy lyrics replaced with patriotic verse. The heritage is saved, but the soul is quietly executed.

The Forgetting Machines

Let’s speak plainly about destruction. When ISIS took sledgehammers to Palmyra, when the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the world gasped at the “loss of cultural heritage.” And it was a loss, a profound one. But the world’s grief was selective. The same countries that mourned Palmyra had, a decade earlier, watched the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad with something closer to embarrassment than outrage. The destruction of heritage is never just about the objects; it’s about the narrative violence. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were not just statues; they were evidence of a pre-Islamic, Buddhist past that the Taliban needed to erase to consolidate their theological-political project. To destroy heritage is to destroy the physical counter-argument to your ideology.

But destruction isn’t always so theatrical. There’s a slower, bureaucratic form of erasure that happens in plain sight. Archives are deaccessioned. Funding is cut for the preservation of minority languages. School curricula are rewritten to emphasize one lineage of “national” culture while ignoring others. In Russia, the “foreign agent” law has effectively criminalized the work of independent historians, archivists, and memory activists who try to preserve the heritage of political repression, of the Gulag, of the many ethnic groups whose histories complicate the grand Slavic narrative. The state does not need to bulldoze a building; it just needs to make sure nobody teaches you why it mattered.

The Aesthetics of Resistance

And yet, heritage has a stubborn afterlife. It leaks out. In the occupied territories of Ukraine, Russian authorities have rushed to “restore” historical monuments, issue new textbooks, and rename streets. But the local populations continue to tend the graves of Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers, sing banned songs in private, and pass down the recipes that carry the taste of a different identity. Heritage here becomes a form of low-level guerrilla warfare, a refusal to accept the official inventory of what is valuable.

This is why I, as a critic, refuse to separate aesthetics from politics. Every act of naming something “heritage” is a political act. Every list, every museum label, every restored facade is a small coup. The question is never simply “Is this beautiful?” or “Is this old?” The question is: Who wants me to remember this, and in precisely this way? What are they asking me to forget?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does cultural heritage become a political battleground?

Because heritage is not about the past—it’s about legitimizing the present. Controlling what is remembered, how it’s remembered, and what is allowed to fade into obscurity gives a regime the power to shape collective identity. A statue, a folk song, or a historic district is a piece of evidence in the ongoing trial of national legitimacy.

How does the market act like a political regime in shaping heritage?

The market imposes a logic of profitability and consumption. It preserves the shell of heritage—the picturesque facade, the quaint tradition—while evicting the living communities that gave it meaning. Gentrification, tourism-driven “revitalization,” and the branding of cultural practices turn heritage into a commodity. The selection principle is not ideological doctrine but return on investment, which is an ideology all its own.

Can heritage ever be truly neutral or apolitical?

No. The very act of selecting something for preservation—whether by a state, a museum, or an international body—involves choices about value, significance, and narrative. Even inaction is political: what is not preserved, not funded, not taught is actively being erased. The fantasy of neutral heritage is a luxury belief of people who have never had their history contested.

What can ordinary people do to resist politicized heritage narratives?

Pay attention to the gaps. Ask who is missing from the museum, the textbook, the landmark list. Support community archives, oral history projects, and independent cultural initiatives that document the unofficial, the marginalized, the inconvenient. The most radical act is often simply to remember out loud, in public, and to refuse the tidy version handed to you.

Picture a velvet rope. Not the one that stops you brushing a Caravaggio with your fingertips—the one strung inside the collective imagination by some committee of dead men and living bureaucrats. Cultural heritage is never just what survived. It’s what somebody, usually decked out with a gilded coat of arms or a five-year plan, decided you ought to remember. The rest moulders in a warehouse, or worse, gets loved without a plaque.

I’m Darya Volkonskaya, and I refuse to separate aesthetics from politics. A fresco isn’t simply a fresco. It’s a territorial claim rendered in egg tempera. A folksong isn’t quaint. It’s a sonic border drawn around a language the state may or may not want you to speak. Let’s talk about the machinery behind the halo.

The Heritage Racket: A Brief and Uncomfortable History

The whole idea of “heritage” as a fixed, sacred list is a modern invention, born from the same 19th-century nationalist fevers that gave us the border checkpoint and the ethnic costume worn only for tourists. Before that, people just… built things on top of other things. The Pantheon became a church not out of some ecumenical spirit, but because marble doesn’t haul itself away. Continuity was a matter of pragmatism, not policy.

The shift happened when states realized controlling the past was cheaper than building the future. Why fund a new aqueduct when you can declare the old one a “national treasure” and make people feel patriotic about their thirst? The French Revolutionaries understood this perfectly. They didn’t just behead a king; they invented the museum as a public act of reclassification—the Louvre was a trophy case of confiscated feudal property, rebranded as the patrimony of the people. The art didn’t change. The label did.

The Soviet Method: From Icon to Artifact

No regime weaponised heritage quite like the Soviets. They were virtuosos of the semantic pivot. A church was an eyesore one day, an “architectural monument” the next. The trick was to sever the object from its living function. An icon behind glass in a state museum isn’t an icon; it’s a specimen, proof that religion was a historical stage we have triumphantly surpassed. The liturgy is silenced, but the gold leaf gets polished. That’s the move: aesthetic preservation as political erasure.

Icons that stayed in working churches were often left to decay—a handy demonstration that the faithful couldn’t look after their own treasures. Meanwhile, the state-restored ones glowed with a secular holiness, whispering that only the Party could truly appreciate beauty. It was a darkly funny game of tautology: we save what we value, and we value what we save. The objects that slipped through this net—the samizdat poems, the unofficial murals in communal kitchens—became a heritage of a different sort, one defined precisely by its exclusion from the official list.

The Bulldozer and the Ballot Box: Modern Regime Swaps

Regime change is the fastest editor of the landscape. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the pendulum didn’t just swing; it tore statues off their plinths and melted them into commemorative coins for the new order. The aesthetic whiplash was dizzying. Lenins were decapitated with the same bureaucratic efficiency with which they’d been erected. But what replaced them? Often, a hurried resurrection of pre-Soviet, nationalist kitsch—a fantasy of a pure past that never existed, cast in cheap bronze.

The process is never neutral. In the Balkans, the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar wasn’t just collateral damage; it was a targeted strike against a physical symbol of a multi-ethnic heritage the shelling was designed to erase. Rebuilding it became an international project, loaded with the anxiety of authenticity. Is the reconstructed bridge the heritage, or the memory of its destruction? The UNESCO plaque speaks of universal value. The bullet holes in the surrounding streets speak of something else.

The Authoritarian Aesthete’s Playbook

Contemporary authoritarianism has refined the Soviet model. It no longer needs to smash icons; it can simply drown them. The strategy: build a colossal, state-funded museum of national glory right next to a site of contested memory. The new structure, all shimmering glass and bombastic statuary, doesn’t deny the past. It contextualises it into irrelevance. The old trauma becomes a small, dark room in the basement of a triumphant narrative.

Consider the use of archaeology. A regime with a territorial claim will fund lavish digs that seek to prove an ancient, continuous presence. Every potsherd becomes a political witness. If the sherds don’t cooperate, the funding dries up, the permits vanish, and the site gets conveniently paved over for a highway. The soil itself is interrogated. Heritage isn’t found; it is subpoenaed.

The Market’s Invisible Hand on the Display Case

We’d be naive to think this is only a game for states with flags and armies. The neoliberal regime has its own velvet rope, and it’s made of auction estimates. When a work of art enters the private collection of a sovereign wealth fund, it undergoes a strange transubstantiation. It ceases to be a public object with a critical history and becomes an asset, a store of value floating in a freeport vault. Its “cultural heritage” status is now a financial instrument. It’s preserved to death, seen by no one, its aura reduced to a line item on a balance sheet.

The art market also rewrites canons with brutal speed. A single record-breaking sale can yank an entire overlooked genre into the spotlight, compelling museums to scramble and revise their permanent collections. What was yesterday a dusty regional curiosity is today a “critical reevaluation of the post-war diaspora.” The market speculates, and the museum, desperate for relevance, curates accordingly. The heritage industry becomes the marketing department for the ultra-rich.

The Counter-Heritage: What Thrives in the Margins

All this top-down machinery produces a shadow: the heritage of the losers, the erased, the inconvenient. It lives in cassette tapes traded in bazaars, in recipes passed down with a deliberate, whispered correction to the official cookbook, in tattoos inked in a script a state has banned. This is heritage as a verb, not a noun. It doesn’t wait for a plaque. It insists on its own transmission, precisely because it knows the official apparatus wants it dead.

This is where aesthetics and politics become truly inseparable. A pattern woven into a carpet isn’t just decoration if the state has outlawed the ethnic identity it encodes. To keep weaving it is a political act. To call it “folk art” and hang it in a ministry lobby is another. The regime doesn’t just reshape the list of heritage; it reshapes the very senses through which we perceive value, training us to see a silent, sterile beauty in sanctioned objects and a dangerous, messy ugliness in the living traditions it wants to extinguish.

The Final Irony of the Museum of Convenient Memory

The ultimate joke is that this process is never complete. The bulldozed statue leaves a dent in the square. The silenced song echoes in the acoustics of the apartment stairwell. The regime can rewrite the textbook, but the body remembers the rhythm of a forbidden dance. Cultural heritage, in its truest and most dangerous form, is the stubborn refusal of a thing to become merely a thing. It insists on being an argument.

So the next time you stand before a beautiful, sanctioned object—a cathedral turned museum, a revolutionary poster in a gilded frame—lean in close. Under the conservation-grade varnish, you can hear the faint, furious hum of all the other objects that weren’t chosen. They are the real collection.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there any such thing as a truly neutral cultural heritage list?

No. Every act of selection is an act of exclusion. A list is a political statement written in the grammar of prestige. The very criteria—“outstanding universal value”—assume a universality that has historically been defined by a narrow, often Western, set of institutions. The question is never “Is this heritage?” but “Whose power does this heritage consolidate?”

How can I tell if a restored site is an act of preservation or propaganda?

Follow the money and read the wall text. If the restoration erases all signs of conflict, decay, or multiple layers of use to present a single, idealised moment in the past, be suspicious. A 17th-century church that looks brand new is telling a lie. Look for what is not being said. Is the story of the people who worshipped there included, or just the architectural details? Authentic preservation should feel like a palimpsest, not a theme park.

What can an ordinary person do to push back against the politicisation of heritage?

Pay attention to the unofficial. Listen to the stories your grandmother tells that don’t match the history books. Visit the monument, but then go eat at the café where the workers from the dig hang out. Support living artists and tradition-bearers who are inconvenient to the state narrative. The most radical act is simply to refuse the singular, official story and insist on the messy, human, contradictory reality that heritage, at its best, can preserve.

I was fifteen when the Soviet Union finished falling apart. From my spot in the crowd, I watched a bronze Lenin get yanked off its pedestal in the town square—chains, a crane, the whole slapstick routine. Everyone cheered, but what stuck with me wasn’t the noise. It was the thought that came right after: that statue didn’t just disappear. It got hauled off to some municipal scrapyard or a collector’s damp basement, and by sunrise it had stopped being “heritage” and turned into junk. The pedestal stood there, blank and awkward, for three months. Then they stuck a fountain on it. This is how heritage actually works. It’s liquid. It sits around waiting for the next regime to freeze it into a shape that’s useful.

Every state curates the past like a sweaty gallery owner thirty minutes before the VIP opening. One government’s national treasure is the next government’s obsolete ideology, so sculptures get melted into ammunition, palaces get a fresh coat of paint and a new nameplate, and the folk songs your grandmother hummed vanish from textbooks if the lyrics contain the wrong kind of hope. None of this is slow, accidental decay. It’s a program. Somebody sat down and decided what stays visible and what gets the hose.

The Velvet Eraser: Heritage as Statecraft

Pretending this is fringe behaviour insults everyone’s intelligence. Regimes edit cultural heritage the way a neurotic proofreader attacks a manuscript: cut this, annotate that, insert three paragraphs of sycophantic flattery. Under Stalin, perfectly good Russian Orthodox churches got dynamited or turned into swimming pools and grain stores. Under Putin, those same buildings get gold-leaf restorations and televised consecrations—not because the state suddenly located God, but because it located a new branding angle. The church becomes “heritage” the moment it props up the current story. When it doesn’t, it’s just old masonry in the way of a highway widening.

I mull this over every time a European city council gets itself into a sweating mess over a colonial-era statue. The fight isn’t about bronze and marble. It’s about who gets to write the explanatory plaque. A statue of a slave trader isn’t a neutral historical document; it’s a frozen power gesture, and the gesture is still throwing its weight around today. Yanking it down isn’t erasing history—it’s rewriting the grammar of public space. The history is still there, in archives, in books, in the scar tissue on the landscape. What we’re squabbling over is which version gets to preen in the town square.

Selective Amnesia and the Tourist Gaze

Heritage tourism makes the manipulation embarrassingly visible. A dictatorship flattens a historic neighbourhood, waits twenty years, then builds a “heritage village” replica on the ring road, complete with costumed artisans and a ticket booth. Tourists snap the fake and call it authentic because the brochure told them to. The real neighbourhood—with its actual, inconvenient, still-breathing residents—was never photogenic enough for the postcards.

I saw this play out in Tbilisi. I walked through a district where old wooden balconies drooped over skinny streets, gorgeous and exhausted. The government had slapped a “cultural heritage zone” designation on the place—but only the facades. Inside, the floors were rotting, the plumbing was a tragedy, and the residents were getting nudged out by rising rents and official neglect. The state wanted the aesthetic, not the people. The heritage label wasn’t a shield. It was a velvet rope, keeping the messy human mess at arm’s length while preserving a pretty shell for Instagram.

The UNESCO Sleight of Hand

Even the international grown-ups don’t escape this. UNESCO’s World Heritage list is a political document dressed in a cultural costume. Countries lobby for sites like they’re bidding for the Olympics, because that little emblem brings a flood of tourism cash and a thin glaze of global respectability. But the list is comically lopsided. Europe bulges with hundreds of sites; whole chunks of Africa make do with a handful. Did Africans build less worthy things? Or was the definition of “outstanding universal value” drafted in Paris and Rome, and does it instinctively favour cathedrals over oral epics, stone ruins over sacred groves?

When a site gets the UNESCO badge, the local government usually reaches for the broom. All of a sudden the scruffy, lived-in chaos around the monument is a “problem” to be solved. Vendors get evicted, informal settlements cleared, rituals scrubbed clean for foreign consumption. The heritage object becomes a prisoner of its own prestige, perfectly preserved and utterly dead. It’s the cultural equivalent of a butterfly pinned under glass.

When the Statues Fight Back

There’s a grim slapstick quality to how often these projects blow up in their planners’ faces. A regime topples a dictator’s statue, melts the bronze, and recasts it as a monument to freedom—only for the next revolution to topple that one too. The pedestal turns into a revolving stage. Some cities have quietly given up on permanent monuments and just rotate temporary installations. That’s honest, at least. It admits that public memory is a bar brawl, not a settled fact.

Even the erasure can curdle into heritage. The empty plinth in my hometown eventually got a small plaque explaining what used to stand there. The absence became the monument. I find that darkly satisfying. It’s a reminder that heritage isn’t the object; it’s the argument about the object. And the argument never packs up and goes home.

The Archive as Counter-Weapon

If regimes reshape heritage by controlling what’s visible, the most radical move is keeping the invisible stuff warm. Underground archives, samizdat art, grandmothers who teach banned songs to their grandkids at the kitchen table—this is heritage the state can’t scrub, because it isn’t bolted to a building or a statue. It’s molecular. It travels through bodies and whispers.

I collect Soviet-era photo albums from flea markets. Not the official ones full of gymnasts and wheat fields, but the handmade family albums: blurry weddings, picnics, someone’s fat cat on a windowsill. This is heritage the regime never sanctioned and can’t really claim. It’s too small, too specific, too stubbornly personal. In a world where heritage is a state weapon, the family album is a tiny act of defiance—a document that says: we were here, we laughed, we existed outside your tidy narrative.

The Future Is a Wrecking Ball with a Preservation Order

As we barrel further into the 21st century, the heritage fights are getting weirder. Digital heritage—defunct websites, dead apps, viral videos that once embarrassed a minister—poses a fresh headache for regimes. Do you archive the dissident’s Twitter thread? Do you preserve the meme that made the president look like a wet cat? The internet forgets nothing, but states are learning to fiddle with that memory too, using strategic takedowns and algorithmic flooding. Same old game, shinier tools.

What gets called “cultural heritage” is never a neutral inventory of the past. It’s a map of power, drawn and redrawn by whoever’s holding the pen. Next time you walk past a monument, ask yourself: who put this here, and what did they bulldoze to make room? The answer is almost always better than the statue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do regimes target cultural heritage first during political transitions?

Heritage is the physical embodiment of a regime’s story about itself. Knocking over a statue or renaming a street isn’t just theatre—it’s a direct attack on the narrative that kept the old power upright. It tells the population the old rules are dead, and it clears space for the new regime to install its own symbols. It’s a fast, cheap way to perform a revolution without actually changing anyone’s material conditions.

Is there such a thing as “authentic” cultural heritage, untouched by politics?

Barely. Even the most ancient, apparently apolitical heritage—a Neolithic stone circle, a medieval monastery—has been interpreted, protected, and presented through political filters. Who decides it’s worth saving? Who pays for the upkeep? Who gets to visit, and under what rules? The raw object might be old, but the frame around it is always contemporary and always political. Authenticity is a negotiation, not a fact.

How can ordinary people resist the state’s manipulation of heritage?

Keep alternative archives. Record your family’s stories, photograph the buildings before they get renovated into beige nothingness, share the songs and recipes that don’t make it into the official folklore collections. Heritage isn’t only what’s listed on a UNESCO document; it’s what communities actually carry forward. The state can bulldoze a building, but it can’t bulldoze a memory that’s been scattered across a hundred kitchens.

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.