It almost always starts with a pedestal. Empty, or worse—occupied by the wrong bronze, the wrong granite jaw, the wrong inscription still legible under a fresh coat of government-approved paint. We get told that heritage is about conservation, dusty reverence, things that simply are old and therefore sacred. But heritage is never found; it gets invented. And the inventors, my dears, are rarely neutral. They wear sashes, sit in cabinets, and have a very specific idea of which past should be allowed to haunt the present.

A regime doesn’t just govern; it curates. It edits the skyline, the museum label, the school textbook until the very feel of the city turns into a script. In Moscow, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour got dynamited in 1931 to clear ground for a never-built Palace of the Soviets, only to rise again in the 1990s as a gargantuan pastiche of piety—a monument not to faith but to the restoration of a particular Russian soul, scrubbed clean of the Soviet stain. Over in Kyiv, Lenin statues once dotted the streets like chess pieces, each one a territorial claim, until the Euromaidan protests of 2013–14 sent them crashing down in a cascade of toppled metal. The pedestal that remains in Shevchenko Park is now a site of grim pilgrimage, a monument to the act of unmaking a monument. That isn’t vandalism. That’s renegotiating what a nation chooses to remember.

The Bulldozer as Curator

Let’s drop the polite fiction that heritage is a gentle old aunt, sitting quietly in a corner with her lace and lavender. Heritage is a weapon. Deployed with surgical precision or blunt force, depending on the regime’s mood. When the Islamic State took sledgehammers to the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in 2015, the world gasped. And yet, that act was itself a form of heritage-making—a deliberate annihilation of a competing narrative, a pre-Islamic past that threatened the group’s monochrome vision of history. They didn’t destroy heritage; they replaced it with a void, which is, after all, a kind of legacy.

Closer to home, the European landscape is littered with quieter erasures. In post-war Poland, the “Recovered Territories” saw German cemeteries, manor houses, and churches systematically Polonized—new plaques, new saints, new names—until the brick and mortar forgot it had ever been anything else. The buildings still stand, but their memory has been surgically extracted. This is the dark art of palimpsest politics: writing a new story over the old one, leaving just enough shadow to make the victor’s tale seem inevitable.

From Revolutionary Vandalism to State-Sponsored Nostalgia

The French Revolution handed us the first modern script for this dance. The Commission des Monuments got formed in 1790 not merely to protect the treasures of the ancien régime, but to reassign them. A royal tomb became a monument to national genius; a church turned into a Temple of Reason. The very word “vandalism” was coined by the Abbé Grégoire in 1794 to condemn the destruction of artworks, but he was drawing a line in the sand: our destruction is revolution, yours is barbarism. The regime had figured out that it could smash the statues of kings while simultaneously inventing the Louvre—a national attic where the spoils of the past could be re-labeled as the patrimony of the people.

This dance hasn’t stopped. Today, the velvet rope replaces the guillotine. Think about the debate over Confederate statues in the American South. To one eye, they’re historic artifacts; to another, they’re bronze metastases of a cancerous nostalgia. When Richmond, Virginia removed its Stonewall Jackson statue in 2020, the empty pedestal quickly got covered in graffiti, protest art, and eventually a community garden. The plinth became a new kind of monument—one to the moment of refusal itself. This is heritage as a live wire, not a fossil.

The UNESCO Paradox: A Global Canon or a Soft Empire?

There’s a special irony in the fact that our most official guardian of heritage, UNESCO, operates on a model that often entrenches the very nation-states whose regimes it pretends to transcend. To get a site inscribed on the World Heritage List, a nation must first nominate it—meaning the state gets to frame the narrative. The Old City of Jerusalem was proposed by Jordan in 1981, and its listing has been a battleground of competing claims ever since: Is it a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim site? The answer depends on which government you ask, and which year it is. UNESCO’s universalist language masks a political boxing ring where every pillar is a punch.

In Venice, a city slowly dissolving into its own lagoon, the battle isn’t between religions but between tourism and habitation. The city’s heritage status has turned it into a museum-mall, where the local population has halved in a generation. The regime here isn’t a single party but the diffuse tyranny of global capital, which has decided that the most authentic Venetian is a day-tripper with a selfie stick. The heritage label becomes a velvet noose.

Socialist Realism and the Erasure of the Avant-Garde

Under Stalin, the entire aesthetic field got collectivized. The avant-garde experiments of the 1920s—Malevich’s black square, Tatlin’s spiraling tower, the constructivist dream of art as a laboratory—were declared formalist decadence. In their place rose Socialist Realism: a style of muscular tractors, heroic workers, and a future that always looked suspiciously like a sanitized past. But this wasn’t just a shift in taste. It was a full-blown heritage operation. Entire art collections were hidden in basements; artists were disappeared; textbooks were rewritten. The regime understood that to control the future, you have to first control the past’s aesthetic DNA.

After 1953, the thaw brought a partial rehabilitation, but the damage was structural. Today, you can visit the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow and see a gaping hole where the 1930s should be. The heritage that survived is the heritage that was useful to the state’s self-image. The rest is a ghost limb.

Post-Colonial Statues and the Unfinished Revolution

The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in 2020 wasn’t an isolated tantrum but a chapter in a much older book. Across Africa, the decolonization of the 1960s saw the wholesale removal of colonial statuary, but the process was far from simple. In Kinshasa, Mobutu Sese Seko erected colossal statues of himself, only to see them torn down after his fall. The pedestal problem recurs: once you start pulling down monuments, it becomes clear that every regime is a sculptor, and every revolution is an iconoclast-in-waiting.

What happens, then, when the statue is not of a person but of an idea? The massive African Renaissance Monument in Dakar, unveiled in 2010, is a bronze couple erupting from a volcano, a monument to a pan-African future that is, in its own way, a retroactive invention. It was criticized for its cost, its North Korean construction, and its depiction of a semi-nude female figure that some saw as objectifying. The monument is, in effect, a heritage claim on a future that does not yet exist—a gamble that the regime’s aesthetic will outlast the regime itself.

The Local Shrine and the Global Market

Not all heritage battles are fought with bronze and marble. Sometimes they’re fought with wood, thatch, and the right to a sacred spring. In the Balkans, the Ottoman-era stone bridges of Bosnia were targeted during the war of the 1990s not because they were military objectives, but because they were symbols of a shared, multi-ethnic past that the nationalists needed to obliterate. The Stari Most in Mostar, destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004, is now a UNESCO site—but the city remains divided, and the bridge is less a crossing than a scar. Heritage here is a kind of phantom limb pain: the thing is back, but the body isn’t whole.

And then there’s the quiet strangulation of the vernacular. In rural Spain, villages are being emptied by economic pressure, and their Romanesque churches are left to molder or be bought by foreign investors. The heritage is still there—the stones, the frescoes—but the community that gave it meaning is gone. What’s left is a hollow shell, ready to be filled by any regime, any narrative, any tourist brochure. This is heritage without a pulse, a perfect corpse for a political resurrection.

A Darkly Funny Coda: The Museum of Broken Regimes

Somewhere, there should exist a museum dedicated entirely to the empty pedestals of the world. A vast hall of plinths, each with a small plaque identifying the vanished monument and the date of its vanishing. The visitor would wander through a forest of absences, each one a testament to the fact that no regime is permanent, no aesthetic is final, and the only true heritage is the relentless, ridiculous human need to make something that will outlast us—and to smash it the moment it means the wrong thing.

Until that museum gets built, we have to read the pedestals that remain. Look at your city’s squares. Who is still standing? Who was never cast? And who is, even now, being poured into bronze in a foundry you will never visit, destined for a plinth that has yet to be emptied? Heritage isn’t a gift from the past. It’s a hostage taken by the present, and the ransom note is always written in the future tense.