Abstract
The chapter examines the activities of architect-conservators in Soviet Leningrad towards the preservation of the city’s churches. Arbitrating in the name of nauka (scholarship and science), they risked censure, on the one hand, from believers, insofar as they decreed certain churches not to be worth preserving, and on the other, censure for covert support for ‘obscurantism’ in impeding the plans of developers for destruction or reconstruction of churches considered to be emblems of the city’s heritage. Defending the claims of nauka, they opposed themselves both to demands for wholesale destruction and for indiscriminate retention. The chapter concludes that widespread claims that the project of secularisation in Russia and the former Soviet Union was a ‘failure’ should be offset against the striking success of Leningrad’s architect-conservators in pushing through their vision of how historic churches should be used—with respect above all for their aesthetic and architectural features—to preserve Russia’s heritage rather than their religious function.
I draw in this article on material collected for my history of churches as architectural monuments in the Soviet period, Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1991 (Catriona Kelly 2016), Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press). My thanks to the AHRC, the University of Oxford, and the Ludwig Fund, New College for supporting the research involved.
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Notes
- 1.
A study that attempts to place such interpretations in perspective, while continuing to subscribe to these, is B. Wilson (1982, 2002) Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford University Press), which contends, for example, that religious authority was able to persist only where development was particularly rapid (p. 39), and that ‘the social system of advanced societies functions on rational premises’ (p. 47). Among influential presentations of a market-driven model of US religious sociology, where the multiplicity of creeds is seen as a sign of strength, rather than of fragmentation and decline, is R.S. Walker (1993) ‘Work in Progress: Towards a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States’, American Journal of Sociology, 98:5, 1044–55.
- 2.
For a clear, if one-sided, account of how Eastern European history calls the secularisation model into question, see P. Froese (2008) The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment Secularization (Berkeley: University of California Press). On the other hand, Steve Bruce (2002) God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell) attempts to account for the specificity of the Eastern European situation by claiming that the social changes there were forced on the population, rather than representing organic social transformation, which begs all kinds of questions.
- 3.
See for example Charles Taylor (2007) The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), which sets its face against what Taylor calls ‘subtraction stories’ in the discussion of cultural history (p. 22).
- 4.
Taylor, Secular Age, p. 4.
- 5.
Nastol’naya kniga ateista (1975) (4th edn.; Moscow: Izdanie politicheskoi literatury), p. 399.
- 6.
V.A. Kuroedov (1982) Religiya i tserkov’ v sovetskom gosudarstve (Moscow: Izdanie politicheskoi literatury), p. 128.
- 7.
For the embarrassment, see for example Nauchnyi ateizm: Uchebnik dlya vuzov (1973) (Moscow: Izdanie politicheskoi literatury), pp. 256–78 (this section on ‘Scientific Atheist Education’, with the exception of some minor alterations to statistical material, also appeared in later editions, such as those of 1974 and 1978, etc.).
- 8.
See for example Michael Froggatt (2006) ‘Science in Propaganda and Popular Culture in the USSR under Khrushchëv (1953–1964)’, D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford.
- 9.
For a first-hand account of the purge against medievalists in Leningrad, see D.S. Likhachev (1995) Vospominaniya (St Petersburg: Logos). A good account of the strained relations between literary historians and Soviet government organisations in the early years is Mikhail Robinson (2004) Sud’by akademicheskoi elity: otechestvennoe slavyanovedenie (1917-nachalo 1930-kh godov) (Moscow: Indrik).
- 10.
Sergei Yarov (2006) Konformizm v sovetskoi Rossii: Petrograd 1917–1920-kh godov (St Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom).
- 11.
For a critical discussion of this, see two round-tables organised by the journal Antropologicheskii forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture (2005) ‘The Research Object and the Subjectivity of the Researcher: Forum 2’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture no. 2, and ‘Fieldwork Ethics: Forum 5’ (2007) Forum for Anthropology and Culture no. 4, http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/en/index/8_1/.
- 12.
G.A. Kuzina (1991) ‘Gosudarstvennaya politika v oblasti muzeinogo dela v 1917–1924 gg’., Muzei i vlast’: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov NII kul’tury (Moscow), vol. 1, p. 155. Cited from E. V. Minkina, ‘P.P. Veiner: muzeinyi rabotnik’, in Ot Muzeya Starogo Peterburga k Gosudarstvennomu muzeyu istorii Sankt-Peterburga. Trudy GMI-SPb. Issledovaniya i materialy (1997) (St Petersburg: GMI-SPb.), pp. 28–9.
- 13.
E.V. Minkina (2011) P.P. Veiner: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (St Petersburg).
- 14.
Certainly, professional architect-conservators were not invulnerable. Aleksandr Anisimov, a leading restorer who worked particularly in Novgorod and Moscow, was arrested in 1930 as part of an alleged ‘counter-revolutionary’ group of ‘idealists and anti-Marxists’ at the Central Restoration Workshops; in 1931, he was sentenced to 10 years in labour camps, and in 1937, was executed (I.L. Kyzlasova (2000) Aleksandr Ivanovich Anisimov (1877–1937), Moscow: Izdanie Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Gornogo universiteta, pp. 57–80). His arrest came during a nationwide crackdown on ‘bourgeois specialists’, and when city planning was undergoing Sovietisation (see Heather DeHaan (2013) Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance and Power in 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod, Toronto: University of Toronto Press). At this point, Konstantin Romanov and Aleksandr Udalenkov, two leading Leningrad restorers, underwent a milder form of purging (see their personal files in the Institute of History of Material Culture, St. Petersburg), after which they played only a marginal role in preservation within the city. However, this period of history (as with museums) was exceptional: there is no evidence for singling out of conservationists even during the purges of 1937–1938, let alone in the post-war era.
- 15.
Father Petr Nechaev (1893) Prakticheskoe rukovodstvo dlya svyashchennosluzhitelei (see e.g. 5th edn.; St. Petersburg: no publisher given), a guidebook for parish priests, gives a good sense of the day-to-day life of the Orthodox Church in the period just before the Revolution. It is still used for seminary courses today.
- 16.
A case in point was when the State Inspectorate of Monuments in Leningrad nagged the ‘post-box institute’ doing secret defence research about repainting the façade of the Saints Simeon and Anne Church, or the director of the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic about the hooks for Soviet banners that had been drilled in the walls of the Church of the Co-Religionists. See the material in files no. 173 (Saints Simeon and Anne) and no. 481 (Co-Religionists), NA UGIOP [Scholarly Archive of the Board of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments], St. Petersburg.
- 17.
It is an open question how much restoration work actually got done at all in Soviet Russia, outside the famous historic cities and individual sites, at least before the War. Judging by the documents in the Institute of History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg, in north-western Russia, activity was, in the 1920s, mainly going on in Novgorod, and even here, little got done in the late 1920s and 1930s. Files in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) indicate that work was also done in Central Asia, particularly Samarkand. From the late 1940s, the picture altered, but even then, the vast majority of normative documents (brochures about notable restorations etc.) concentrated on Moscow and Leningrad. A usefully broad survey of Soviet restoration practice that confirms this picture of late development in the so-called periphery (the Russian provinces and non-Russian republics) is the massive collection of articles ed. A. S. Shchenkov (ed.) (2004) Pamyatniki arkhitektury v Sovetskom Soyuze: ocherki istorii arkhitekturnoi restavratsii (Moscow: Pamyatniki istoricheskoi mysli).
- 18.
Anatoly Vol’nokhodov (1913) ‘Okhrana Russkoi Stariny’, cutting from Russkaya Rech’ no. 2179, held in the files of the Defence and Preservation in Russia of Artistic and Historic Monuments, RA IIMK, f. 68, ed. khr. 1, ll. 42–42 ob. As a note in the file indicates (ibid.), the article was written with the direct cooperation of the Society.
- 19.
A draft of this statement is held in the personal archive of Konstantin Romanov, RA IIMK, f. 29, ed. khr. 12, l. 7–9. It was likely written by Romanov himself, who was also the author of various draft statutes on monument preservation. Typewritten in the old orthography, the text probably dates from the early autumn of 1917. The Union of Art Activists [Soyuz deyatelei iskusstv], which held its inaugural conference in March 1917, and ceased its existence in September of the following year, is best-known as a force for the defence of artistic autonomy, but as the present case shows, state-public relations were more complicated than this interpretation might suggest.
- 20.
‘Zapis’ obsuzhdeniya Osoboi Komissii, sozdannoi po porucheniyu Zav. Petrogradskim Otdeleleniem Aktsentra […]’, 4–5 March 1922, RA IMMK, f. 67, ed. khr. 73, l. 79–79 ob.
- 21.
See the report of 15 December 1922, TsGA-SPb., f. 1001, op. 7, d. 19, l. 20.
- 22.
Ibid., l. 36.
- 23.
NA IMMK, f. 67, ed. khr. 86, l. 13.
- 24.
For an excellent discussion of the Anti-Religious Museum in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, see Adam Jolles (2005) ‘Stalin’s Talking Museums’, Oxford Art Journal 28.
- 25.
TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 25, op. 2, d. 2000, ll. 10–11.
- 26.
TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 24, op. 10, d. 421, l. 20.
- 27.
This mission is set out, for instance, in the planning materials for the Museum (see TsGALI-SPb., f. 276, op. 1, d. 37, passim; ibid., d. 45, passim). An aggressively anti-religious policy was also supported by rank-and-file ‘militant atheists’: see for example the letter from Yuly Blok, 2 June 1940, which contrasts the light and crowds in the Leningrad working churches for Easter 1940 and the power-cut state of St. Isaac’s: TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 24, op. 2в, d. 4410, ll. 43–44.
- 28.
The St. Petersburg anthropologist Dmitry Baranov has dealt with the ethnographical museum in an excellent series of articles; see for example his contribution to Bassin and Kelly (eds.) (2012) Soviet and Post-Soviet Identity, and ‘“Imparting” Traditions: How the National Past Was Written into the Narrative of the Soviet People’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture no. 9, 184–99.
- 29.
TsGALI-SPb., f. 276, op. 1, d. 14, l. 2.
- 30.
An example was the wooden Trinity Cathedral on Revolution Square in Leningrad, demolished in 1933, though it had been extensively restored in the 1910s and 1920s after a fire in 1922.
- 31.
For example, the Trinity-Izmailovsky Regiment Cathedral.
- 32.
During 1942–1943, the illustrated weekly Ogonek regularly carried pictures of heritage sites, such as Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana, that had been destroyed by the ‘fascist invader’.
- 33.
See for example Academician Igor Grabar, ‘Vosstanovlenie pamyatnikov stariny’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo 28 November 1944, p. 2. I discuss this wartime change more extensively in ‘The Shock of the Old: Architectural Preservation in Soviet Russia’, forthcoming in Nations and Nationalism (special issue on European heritage, ed. Mark Thatcher), 2016.
- 34.
See the critical, but balanced account of his life in A. A. Formozov (2004) ‘Rol’ N.N. Voronina v zashchite pamiatnikov kul’tury Rossii’, Rossiiskaia arkheologiia no. 2, 173–80.
- 35.
‘Spravka o sostoyanii narodnogo obrazovaniya v raionakh oblasti, osvobozhdennykh ot nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov’ January 1944 (exact date not given), TsGAIPD-SPb., f. 24, op. 11, d. 198, ll. 1–2.
- 36.
‘Tablitsa stoimosti ushcherbov, prichinennykh otdel’nym pamyatnikam arkhitektury, nakhodyashchikhsya v gorodakh Novgorode, Gdove, Staroi Russe, Tikhvine, Gatchine, Ropshe, Usad’be, Gruzino i sostoyashchim pod gosudarstvennoi okhranoi’, TsGANTD-SPb., f. 388, op. 1–1, d. 2, l. 1–3.
- 37.
See for example Nathaniel Davis (1995) A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy (Boulder: Westview Press).
- 38.
A case in point was Metropolitan Grigory (Chukov) of Leningrad, whose diary of his 1947 visit to the USA is available in L.K. Aleksandrova (ed.) (2012) Dnevnik; Fragmenty. Arkhiv. Istoriko-bogoslovskoe nasledie mitropolita Grigoriya (Chukova) (St Petersburg, http://www.bogoslov.ru/text/2908919.html.)
- 39.
This was also true in the late 1920s, but at that period, there was less effort on the part of the Soviet authorities to prove that believers were being humanely treated. Wheeling out clerics of various hues (rabbis and imams as well as priests) to make claims that there was religious freedom in the USSR became a much-repeated routine in the Cold War era, as the files of the Plenipotentiaries on Religious Affairs make clear.
- 40.
TsGA-SPb., f. 9620, op. 1, d. 9, l. 25. For an indication of the possible prompting of this—a story in the French press about the arrest on charges of spying of Madame Bovard, a parishioner of the Church of Our Lady of France, and a resident of the city since 1911, as well as a holder of two medals for wartime bravery and ‘noble labour’ (doblestnyi trud), see ibid., ll. 1–2.
- 41.
ASPbE, f. 1, op. 7, d. 40, l. 12.
- 42.
By the start of the 1980s, the Council on Religious Affairs was closely monitoring the state of all religious buildings that stood along so-called tourist routes (i.e. those which foreigners were officially allowed to use on visits to the USSR). Grigory Zharinov, in response to a telephone enquiry, filed a list of such buildings in April 1982, in which he claimed that all such churches in Leningrad province were in good condition, including those seldom or never visited by tourists anyway: TsGA-SPb., f. 2017, op. 1, d. 77, ll. 54–55.
- 43.
The Novgorod reconstruction works are extensively discussed in Shchenkov (ed.), Pamyatniki arkhitektury. See also Victoria Donovan (2011) ‘Nestolichnaya kul’tura: Regional and National Identity in Post-1961 Russian Culture’, D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford.
- 44.
ASPbE [Archive of the St. Petersburg Eparchy], f. 1, op. 11a, d. 10, l. 3. Emphasis added.
- 45.
For example, in Voronezh, where I lived as a student from 1980–1981, several churches in the centre were still burnt-out shells, and one of these, dating from the sixteenth century, was being used as a rock-climbing range.
- 46.
For the case of the Prince Vladimir Cathedral, see ASPbE, f. 1, op. 7, d. 18, ll. 29–34. On l. 34 is a note: ‘Gold leaf issued. 30 July 1949’.
- 47.
I remember this obligatory element in excursions when visiting Russia as a student in 1979–1981: we were told, for example, that the architecture of Novgorod was a tribute to the glorious achievements of the narod, while at the same time being told that the architecture on the far bank of the river was an expression of merchant taste.
- 48.
‘Museum reserves’ began to be set up in the 1940s, but the pace of creating them increased from the 1960s, till, by the early 1980s, historic areas in most major towns and cities were so denominated, both in the RSFSR and beyond (e.g. the old centres of Samarkand, Bukhara, Baku), alongside individual sites such as Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia, and others. For a discussion of one particularly important museum-reserve, the wooden architecture museum on the island of Kizhi, see Sanami Takahashi (2009) ‘Church or Museum? The Role of State Museums in Conserving Church Buildings, 1965–1985’, Journal of Church and State, 51:3, 502–17. For a memoir from a local historian directly involved in the creation of the museum reserve at Yaroslavl’, see M.G. Meierovich (2004) U menya poyavilas’ mechta (Yaroslavl’: Aleksandr Rutman).
- 49.
For further details of this period, see Catriona Kelly (2013) ‘From “Counter-Revolutionary Monuments” to “National Heritage”: The Preservation of Leningrad Churches, 1964–1982’, Cahiers du monde russe 1, 1–30.
- 50.
M.E. Kaulen (1992) ‘Problemy sovremennogo ekspozitsionnogo pokaza kul’tovykh inter’erov i perspektivy ispol’zovaniya kul’tovykh sredstv’, in E.A. Shulepova (ed.) Voprosy okhrany i ispol’zovaniya pamyatnikov istorii i kul’tury (Moscow: Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut kul’tury), pp. 117–21.
- 51.
Kaulen, ‘Problemy sovremennogo ekspozitsionnogo pokaza’, pp. 123–6.
- 52.
This was the case, for example, in the summer of 2013, when my sister and I visited a large number of churches in Moscow, Uglich, Yaroslavl’, and Kirillovo-Belozersk; most were non-active, but in the majority of those, there was live choral singing (and, in a specifically post-Soviet touch, sales of the choral group’s CDs at a stall alongside).
- 53.
From an interview with a long-standing parishioner of the St. Petersburg church concerned by Alexandra Piir, Oxf/AHRC-SPb-09 PF16 AP. For a similar account, see her interview with the church elder, Oxf/AHRC SPb-08 PF12 AP.
- 54.
Interviewed by Alexandra Piir, Oxf/AHRC SPb-08 PF8 AP. The informant was at all points extremely cautious about giving the impression of conflict, and was only ‘off the record’ prepared to cite a completely different case—a famous monastery—where he had heard from a friend that relations were much more vexed than in the church his institute had used. Another informant (Oxf/AHRC SPb-08 PF9 AP) was considerably more explicit about conflicts with the Church. ‘There was one of the priests in charge back then. He behaved… well, not very courteously and politely’. As well as presenting his memories of this case, he mounted a wide-ranging attack on the Church’s enhanced social status (its access to tax concessions, its obstruction of museification projects, e.g. in Tobol’sk, and its privileges in terms of government subsidies for restoration). While not always factually accurate (the informant had the impression that government subsidies for restoration were commonplace in the Soviet period, whereas they were reserved for buildings considered to be of extraordinary merit), the account given here was highly characteristic of the corporate values held by architect-restorers, museum-workers, archaeologists, and others professionally involved in the national heritage industry.
- 55.
Smol’nyi and St. Isaac’s formed part of the ‘Museum of Four Cathedrals’, along with the Church of the Saviour on the Blood and the Sampson Cathedral; the St. Peter and St. Paul Cathedral was run by the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.
- 56.
See the post signed Lyudmila Il’yunina on the site, ‘Russkie tserkvi—O khrame Presvyatoi Bogoroditsy na Rybatskom prospekte’, http://russian-church.ru/viewpage.php?cat=petersburg&page=48.
- 57.
Dmitry Verkhoturov, ‘Bor’ba tserkvi za imushchestvo, nevziraya ni na chto’ (20 September 2007). First published on ‘Regiony Rossii’ site; see http://scepsis.ru/library/id_1486.html. Cf. L. Vorontsova, ‘Razrushat’ li muzei radi tserkovnogo vozrozhdeniya?’ (extract from her book Religiya i demokratiya, Moscow, 1993), http://scepsis.ru/library/id_904.html (accessed 17 March 2015): ‘Only a few cultic monuments were handed over to museums, and it goes without saying that exactly these were the ones that have survived to the present in the best shape’. This assessment leaves out of consideration the fact that churches used for worship were also kept in very good condition.
- 58.
In March 1990, Metropolitan Alexii declined to accept a further 20 churches on behalf of the Leningrad Eparchy, including the Royal Stables Church and St. Isaac’s Cathedral, on the grounds that this was simply not practical (ASPbE., f. 1, op. 11, d. 99, l. 50; one reason was a shortage of priests, the other that the interior of the Royal Stables Church was presumably in terrible condition).
- 59.
This was undoubtedly related to the long history of anti-clerical attitudes to the Orthodox Church in the Russian intelligentsia: as Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams put it in her memoirs, first published in 1954, ‘the only thing that stopped the intelligentsia from storming the Church was police regulations’ (Vospominaniya [Moscow: Slovo, 1998], p. 242). This recollection has all the more authority in that Tyrkova-Williams was a liberal who wrote her memoirs in emigration, in other words, was not contributing to a Soviet legitimation narrative.
- 60.
See, for instance, the debate on reconstructing churches in St. Petersburg that grew up round the Live Journal entries by a widely-read local historian in 2011 (http://babs71.livejournal.com/486024.html?page=1#comments), accessed 17 March 2015. One participant, for example, observed: ‘it’s all subjective, of course, but: it’s not a good idea to pull churches down, or anything else for that matter—but if the architecture’s bad, then you have to, only replace it by something better’. In 2013, when I took part in a debate about conservation broadcast on local TV, all the participants (who included an architectural historian and a theatre historian as well as a member of an architectural preservation lobby group) agreed off-air that the rebuilding of churches was not a good idea, with the possible exception of the Church of the Saviour on the Haymarket, whose demolition has, since the 1960s, been generally acknowledged as a disaster (for more on this topic, see Kelly, ‘From “Counter-Revolutionary Monuments”’).
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Kelly, C. (2016). Religion and Nauka: Churches as Architectural Heritage in Soviet Leningrad. In: Betts, P., Smith, S. (eds) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54639-5_10
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