When I began undergraduate studies in art history in Bucharest in 2009, I was struck by a contradiction. Professors, as well as the society, vilified the communist period for having destroyed the heritage of the past and for looking to replace the historical Orthodox identity of Romanians. At the same time though, professors were praising in class the preservation practices and research about historical monuments done in the same communist period and contrasted it with present times. It made sense since most books and articles we used to study the Romanian medieval or early-modern periods were written between 1945 and 1990. Therefore, I wondered what was actually the truth about preservation and historical heritage during communism? Was there an attempt to erase the traces of the past or preserve and research them?
The present volume is a head-on exploration of this conundrum. By looking at various processes in several Soviet countries, it states that preservation and promotion of the past heritage was in fact a main concern of the time. As editors Corinne Geering and Paul Vickers state, “Soviet policy-making regarded the preservation and use of heritage as a resource in the continuous construction of the future communist society” (35). Moreover, socialist states played a decisive role in international organizations such as UNESCO, ICOMOS (established in Warsaw in 1965), ICOM, and their specialists collaborated intensely among each other and with western ones. The volume is therefore a welcome addition to the history of preservation post-WWII, where the Soviet contribution is largely unknown and unrecognized equally in western scholarship and post-communist societies.
The volume goes beyond merely including Socialist states in the broader history of preservation, however. It also pays attention to international transfers and exchanges within and beyond the region, on how nation-building efforts went hand in hand with increased internationalization, on forms of continuity with pre-war policies, and on the activity and influence of multiple actors, from official policies to tourist guides who shaped and even contested official narratives. Overall, the volume is innovative with both its theme and approach to the subject. It justly portrays socialist societies as dynamic entities, marked by an entangled decision-making process, decentralization, and contestations. It is a highly welcomed perspective, revising the more traditional western view of the Soviet space as a uniform and largely static “bloc.”
In Chapter 1, Geering focuses on the development of infrastructure for heritage promotion and preservation in the Soviet Union. She argues that officials “used culture as a resource for economic development” (42), by encouraging tourism, creating museums, and cultural itineraries, therefore following UNESCO principles of using preservation in the service of social and cultural development. Chapter 2, Julia Röttjer looks at the shaping of early UNESCO policies in Poland, a country that submitted no less than five entries to be considered for the World Heritage list at the very first session, in 1978, even if the limit was two. Röttjer argues that these were presented as sites significant for both Polish historical and present identity. For example, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was presented as a place of struggles for Polish Jews and of active national resistance. In Chapter 3, Iryna Sklokina explores how tourism created and shaped heritage at an unofficial level, via guides, visitors, local leaders, tastes, and expectations in Soviet Ukraine in 1964. It focuses mainly on Ukrainian diaspora tourists, for whom local guides adapted their discourse and itineraries in ways that nuanced official Soviet narratives. Chapter 4, by Karin Hallas-Murula and Kaarel Truu, is the first to focus specifically on preservation practices and follows how experts in Soviet Estonia were professionally shaped by their many travels and contacts outside the Iron Curtain and among other socialist states, leading to the definition of an Estonian historical identity.
Chapter 5 by Eszter Gantner focuses on a single building, which is a welcome counterpart to the other more general contributions. It describes the debates and international exchanges around the reconstruction of the Castle Hill and Royal Palace in Budapest in the 1950s. In 1952, even a team of Polish experts were invited at the site before the government decided to turn the monument into a cultural center. In Chapter 6, Liliana Iuga looks at the ideas and writings about the preservation of historic city centers in the first decades of socialist Romania. She describes how architects made a distinction between medieval towns in Transylvania, founded by German settlers, which they saw as worthy of being preserved, and towns in Wallachia and Moldavia where the international principle of “selective preservation” was deemed suitable. In Chapter 7, Čeněk Pýcha describes the evolution of the concept of heritage in Czechoslovakia by focusing on monuments and preservation in the town of Duchov, in northwest Bohemia. The author uses mostly official documents to trace how authorities promoted both historical sites and a contemporary socialist monument commemorating the deadly worker strike of 1932. Finally, Chapter 8 by Nele-Hendrikje Lehmann examines the protection of industrial monuments in East Germany to argue that the process was less a result of Marxist ideology and more a continuation of trends from interwar Germany as well as a response to similar international trends. A concluding chapter by Geering provides an excellent summary of the whole book as well as some valuable thoughts on future research avenues.
The volume covers a diverse range of themes but mostly employs the term heritage in the narrow sense of built architecture, ignoring the whole range of intangible cultural properties to which the promotion of the past is closely connected, for example folk traditions or literary production. The contributions could have been enriched also by more detail on the type of architecture and history of the fascinating heritage sites discussed, such as the town of Duchcov, Transylvanian towns, Suzdal, and others, which would help readers have a specific sense of what type of heritage was deemed worthy of preservation. The volume is nevertheless an excellent addition to the cultural history of the Cold War period, is informed by cutting-edge theoretical approaches, and will surely be a road-opener for further exploration of heritage practices in socialist eastern Europe.
