This article draws on research for the project “National Identity in Russia: Traditions and Deterritorialisation,” generously sponsored by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Travel and interviewing costs were also supported by the Ludwig Fund, New College. Interviews from the project use the code Oxf/AHRC, the place code SPb and year, as well as a recording number and the initials of the interviewer. My thanks go to the interviewers and informants, to Canon Michael Bourdeaux, Aleksandr Margolis, Mikhail Shkarovskii, Aleksandr Kobak, and Aleksandra Piir for their help and advice, and also to the audience of, organizers of, and participants in the “Urban Anthropology” (Antropologiia goroda i gorodskoi fol'klor) seminar at the European University, St. Petersburg, for their comments at a session on 6 April 2011. An Appendix of key documents discussed in the article, particularly the official lists of monuments, is available online at http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism/churches.htm.

1. Here and below, quotations are from G. A. Tiurin, “Ob ispol'zovanii zdanii zakrytykh tserkvei i molitvennykh domov,” Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt- Peterburga (TsGA-SPb.), f. 7384, op. 33, d. 50, 11. 10-13. Emphasis in the original. My English translation attempts to capture the ungainly nature of the original.

2. The official name of Nevskii Prospect between 1918 and 1944.

3. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 163,1. 89. Again, my translation attempts to capture the style of the original.

4. See, for example, Gorham, Michael, “Tongue-Tied Writers: The Rabsel'kor Movement and the Voice of the New Intelligentsia,” Russian Review 55, no. 3 (July 1996): 412-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lenoe, Matthew E., Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).Google Scholar

5. On the planned demolitions, see further TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 50,1. 170; TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 76,11. 26-44.

6. Izvestiia, 4 December 1931 (signed V. Molotov). Reprinted in Vestnik Lensoveta, no. 161 (1931): 1.

7. See, for example, Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Figes, Orlando and Kolonitskii, Boris I., Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999).Google Scholar

8. Poliakova, M. A., Okhrana kul'turnogo naslediia Rossii: Uchebnoe posobie dlia vuzov (Moscow, 2005), 7, 9.Google Scholar

9. Bezhin Lug was itself, of course, a victim of Stalinist iconoclasm (made in 1935, it was banned in 1937, before distribution, and the film stock was destroyed); the point that I am making here is that the film has colored retrospective understandings of Soviet practice since it was reconstructed from stills in 1968.

10. Cf. an estimate from 1931 that to blow up the Chesma Church would have raised 34,000 rubles’ worth of building materials, but the demolition, plus the cost of the detailed survey required by the Monuments Office, would have added up to 21,500 rubles, “not including the cost of the church” (in the sense, presumably, of what would now be termed “opportunity costs,” or the expense of finding other space to replace that lost). See TsGASPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 37,1. 34.

11. Cf. the report by K. M. Negliuevich, the head of Admnadzor (the Administration and Surveillance Section of Lenoblispolkom), 20 June 1933: “16 objects are being demolished with long delays and a check has established that the work has ground to a halt and almost nothing is happening.” N. Iu. CherepninaandM. V. Shkarovskii, Sankt-Peterburgskaia eparkhiia v dvadtsatom veke v svete arkhivnykh materialov (St. Petersburg, 2000), 183.

12. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 40, 1. 13. One could perhaps compare the “rehabilitation” of “bourgeois” dwellings as “communal apartments” in the 1920s, a strategy that was both practical (because of housing shortages) and ideological—the apartments were supposed to propound “communal values.” Julia Obertreis provides the fullest study of the history of this process. See Obertreis, , Tränen des Sozialismus: Wohnen in Leningrad zwischen Alltagund Utopie, 1917-1937 (Cologne, 2004).Google Scholar

13. Monuments Office is used here as a shorthand for the authority charged with recording and protecting pamiatniki, the name of which altered at different times: in the early 1920s, it was known as the Museums Department while in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was the Bureau for the Protecdon of Monuments, and from the mid-1930s, Secdon for the Protecdon of Monuments. During World War II, the tide changed to the State Inspectorate of Monuments, a tide used right to the end of the Soviet period. While primarily answerable to local government, the office also liaised with the central government (in the early days, the Glavnauka section of Narkompros and, in later decades, the Ministry of Culture). The unique nature of the Leningrad arrangements generated a major standoff with Narkompros in 1938-39, which was won by the Leningrad city authorities with the backing of Gosplan and other central bodies. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GA RF), f. 259, op. 37, d. 304,11. 1-30.

14. Among recent studies are Davis, Nathaniel, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy (Boulder, Colo., 1995)Google Scholar; Young, Glennys, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (Philadelphia, 1997)Google Scholar; Husband, William B., “Godless Communists“: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (DeKalb, 2000)Google Scholar; Roslof, Edward E., Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington, 2002)Google Scholar; Kenworthy, Scott M., The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism, and Society after 1825 (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Greene, Robert H., Bodies like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb, 2010)Google Scholar; Panchenko, Alexander, ‘“Popular Orthodoxy’ and Identity in Twentieth-Century Russia: Ideology, Consumption and Competition,” in Bassin, Mark and Kelly, Catriona, eds., Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), 321-40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. On Leningrad, see particularly the work of M. V. Shkarovskii, e.g., Peterburgskaia eparkhiia v gody gonenii i ulrat, 1917-1945 (St. Petersburg, 1995). In partnership with N. Iu. Cherepnina, Shkarovskii has also made available to researchers an enormous amount of primary material, particularly from TsGA-SPb. See, inter alia, Spravochnik po istorii pravoslavnykh monastyrei i soborov g. Sankt-Peterburga, 1917-1945 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1996); Pravoslavnye khramy Sankt-Peterburga, 1917-1945 (St. Petersburg, 1999); Cherepnina and Shkarovskii, Sankt-Peterburgskaia eparkhiia. See also Ocherki istorii Sankt-Peterburgskoi eparkhii, ed. Metropolitan loann (Snychev) (St. Petersburg, 1994); A. N. Kashevarov, Gosudarstvo i tserkov': h istorii vzaimootnoshenii sovetskoi vlasti i russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi, 1917-1945 (St. Petersburg, 1995); Father Dionisii Burmistrov, “Leningradskaia eparkhiia v usloviiakh antitserkovnykh gonenii v 1929-1939 gg. (po materialam arkhivov Sankt-Peterburga i Leningradskoi oblasti),” at http://www.religare.ru/2_65553.html (last accessed 21 September 2012). There is also excellent work on the war and postwar years by Shkarovskii, by O. I. Khodarkovskaia (see her introduction to the online resource “Blokadnyi Hiram“), and by Elena Shun'gina, the author of a 2009 dissertation on church-state relations in postwar Leningrad.

16. The definitive study is V V Antonov and A. V. Kobak, Sviatyni Sankt-Peterburga, 3d ed. (St. Petersburg, 2010). See also Pavlov, A. P., Khramy Sankt-Peterburga: Khudozhestvenno-istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1995)Google Scholar; Kudriashov, Sergei and Rumiantseva, Irina, Monastyri Sankt-Peterburgskoi eparkhii: Spravochnik palomnika (St. Petersburg, 2000).Google Scholar

17. Dluzhnevskaia, G. V., Utrachennyekhramy Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 2003), 5–6.Google Scholar

18. Interview with Father N., a priest in one of St. Petersburg's cathedrals, April 2009. In recent years, the commemorative function of churches has been especially emphasized by the Orthodox Church hierarchy: the Prince Vladimir Cathedral in St. Petersburg now houses a “memorial book,” in which city-dwellers can have the names of their relatives entered (this is a kind of modern, electronic version of the traditional “synodicon,” or book of remembrance), and there have been high-profile, and often controversial, campaigns to construct churches on memorial sites, such as the Blockade Church, Levashovo Cemetery, and so on. See, e.g., http://www.cogita.ru/dokumenty/k-voprosu-o-vozvedenii-hrama-nalevashovskom-memorialnom-kladbische and http://www.cogita.ru/intervyu/anatolii-razumov (last accessed 21 September 2012).

19. The most namolennye churches are generally thought to be in Moscow. See, e.g., Elena Titarenko, “Angely Peterburga,” a review of E. N. Petrova and I. Iu. Klimov, eds., Religioznyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 2004), at http://www.kultura-portal.ru/tree_new/cultpaper/article.jsp?number=594&rubric_id=205&crubric_id=1000241&pub_id=672520 (last accessed 21 September 2012). But such churches are to be found in Petersburg too: “In the postwar years this church [of the Mother of God of Smolensk in the Smolenskoe Cemetery] was the only working church on Vasilievskii Island and attracted a vast quantity of believers. No wonder it is considered one of the most namolennye in Petersburg,” at http://www.paida.ru/show.php?lft=ev_lt_01&rt=ev_rt_church_smol (accessed 7 July 2009; no longer accessible). The same, or very similar, material is now available at http://www.worldwalk.info/ru/catalog/604/ (tide of item, “Tserkov’ Smolenskoi ikony Bozhiei Materi“; last accessed 21 September 2012). For namolit', see also Oxf/AHRC SPb-11 PF21 MS (interview with a nun, born circa 1975).

20. A priest at one of St. Petersburg's cathedrals whom I interviewed in April 2009 expanded at length on these issues. He requested that the interview not be taped, but my field notes provide a detailed synopsis.

21. Studies focus above all on the titanic efforts to save monuments in the Great Patriotic War and reconstruct them in the years following. See Kedrinskii, A. A. et al., Letopis’ vozrozhdeniia: Vosstanovlenie pamiatnikov arkhitektury i prigorodov, razrushennykh v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami (Leningrad, 1971)Google Scholar; Kedrinskii, A. A. et al., Vosstanovlenie pamiatnikov arkhitektury Leningrada (Leningrad, 1983)Google Scholar; Kirikov, B. M., Okhrana arkhitekturnykh pamiatnikov Leningrada v gody sovetshoi vlasti (Leningrad, 1988)Google Scholar; Okhrana pamiatnikov Sankt-Peterburga: K90-tetiiu Komiteta po gosudarstvennomu kontroliu, ispol'zovaniiu i okhranepamiatnikov istorii i kul'tury Sankt-Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 2008). Iu. Bakhareva and N. S. Tret'iakova, comp., “Iz dnevnikov khranitelei prigorodnykh dvortsov-muzeev Leningrada, 1941-1945,” Otechestvennye arkhivy 1 (2007), at http://www.rusarchives.ru/publication/mobil.shtml (last accessed 21 September 2012); some of the ambiguities of monument preservation are briefly acknowledged in B. Kirikov, “Kakie pamiatniki okhraniaem?” Leningradskaia panorama 11 (1991): 15-17.

22. For interviews with conservators taking a nostalgic view, see, for example, Oxf/ AHRC SPb-08 PF2 AP, PF5 AP, and PF6 AP.

23. See an Internet discussion on Rosbalt-Peterburg, 4 August 2008: “Ekspert: Muzei pukhnutotbogatsv, prinadlezhashchikh tserkvi,” at http://www.rosbalt.ru/2008/08/04/510128.html (last accessed 21 September 2012), and our interviews with members of the clergy, April 2009, Oxf/AHRC SPb-09 PF2 VM, PF3 VM, and others.

24. A rare source to point out that church buildings were sometimes demolished with the knowledge and consent of the Monuments Office is L. Protsai, “Utrachennye svyiatyni,” in E. N. Petrova and I. Iu. Klimov, eds., Religioznyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 2004), 447-59.

25. See, for example, Clark, Katerina, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), chap. 1Google Scholar; Ruble, Blair A., Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar; L. Lur'e and A. Kobak, “Rozhdenie i gibel’ peterburgskoi idei,” Muzei igorod, a special issue of the journal Petersburg ars (1993): 25-31; Emily D.Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park, 2006).

26. See, alongside the sources cited, the discussions of Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (New York, 1995); Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the introduction and different contributions included in Helena Goscilo and Stephen A. Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg (Bloomington, 2008). For a specialist historical study of the palace restorations, see Steven Maddox, “Healing the Wounds: Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad's Imperial Heritage, 1941-1950” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2008); my thanks to the author for making this text available to me. A rare source to point to discontinuities is Elena Hellberg-Hirn, Imperial Imprints: Post-Soviet St. Petersburg (Helsinki, 2003), which emphasizes diat there was almost no discussion of the prerevolutionary history of Leningrad in official Soviet sources (a point that is perhaps overstated but that acts as an important corrective to the customary arguments about the city).

27. See, for example, the architectural studies of William Brumfield (A History of Russian Architecture [Cambridge, Mass., 1993], and “St. Petersburg and the Art of Survival,” in Goscilo and Norris, eds., Preserving Petersburg, 1-38, both of which are illustrated with Brumfield's handsome photographs), or the various publications of Boris M. Kirikov (Arkhitektura peterburgskogo moderna: Osobniaki i dokhodnye doma [St. Petersburg, 2003], Pamiatniki arkhitektury i istorii Sankt-Peterburga: Vasileostrovskii raion [St. Petersburg, 2006]; Pamiatniki arkhitehtury i istorii Sankt-Peterburga: Petrogradskii raion [St. Petersburg, 2004]), which are mainly based on Soviet-era materials from the archive of the Monuments Office.

28. For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Kelly, Catriona, “A Dissonant Note on the Neva': Historical Memory and City Identity in Russia's Second Capital during the Post-Stalin Era,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 72–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the observations of Elidor Mehilli, “The Socialist Design: Urban Dilemmas in Postwar Europe and the Soviet Union,” Kritika 13, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 641-43.

29. See, e.g., the reference to this practice in the material on the demolition of the St. Matthew Church—its bricks were to be used for the nadstroika of the buildings standing round it.

30. Rabinowitch, Alexander, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington, 2007), 56.Google Scholar

31. There is a large literature on the history of these issues in western Europe and the United States. Along with the classic citation, Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984-1992), see Bluestone, Daniel, “Academics in Tennis Shoes: Historic Preservation and the Academy,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (1999): 300–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Urban, Florian, “Recovering Essence through Demolition: The ‘Organic’ City in Post-War Berlin,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 3 (2004): 354-69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neil Sharp, “The Wrong Twigs for an Eagle's Nest? Architecture, Nationalism, and Sir Hugh Lane's Scheme for a Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1904-1913,” in Michaela Giebelshausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (Manchester, Eng., 2003), 32-53.

32. As set out, for example, in Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis: 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), the contributors to Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Perspective (Stanford, 2003), and more recently by David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (New Haven, 2009), and Hagenloh, Paul, Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Washington, D.C., 2009).Google Scholar

33. For the presentation and implementation of a schematic topology of different forms of Marxism in early Soviet culture, see Priesdand, David, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford, 2007).Google Scholar

34. Work on the specific case of the “Renovationist” movement, which explicitly sought accommodation with Soviet power (see, e.g., Roslof, Red Priests), naturally espouses a “partial convergence” model. A good primary source on this for Leningrad is the excellent and, to judge by archival evidence, remarkably accurate memoir by A. E. Krasnov-Levitin, Likhie gody, 1925-1941: Vospominaniia (Paris, 1977). Rogers, Douglas, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Ithaca, 2009)Google Scholar, seeks to obviate a simplistic “resistance” paradigm in the case of an Old Believer community. On the other hand, the Old Believers were not subject to the same level of persecution as the Orthodox (since, as a persecuted minority under the old regime, they had the luster of oppositional status); up to the “Stalinist Concordat” of 1943, there is quite a lot of evidence for systematic self differentiation on the part of Orthodox communities other than the Renovationists. See Young, Power and the Sacred; Panchenko, “Popular Orthodoxy“; Catriona Kelly, “Competing Orthodoxies: Identity and Religious Belief in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” in Bassin and Kelly, eds., Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, 299-320. At the same time, by the late 1930s, believers, at least in Leningrad, sometimes employed strategies they thought would appeal to representatives of Soviet power—for instance, references to the Stalinist Constitution of 1936 or even addresses such as the following in an anonymous letter to Stalin on 23 February 1939: “Dear cfomrade] 1.1, [sic.] I ask you to open the Orthodox Church bekos I have received the conviction that through this we May become Victors of the World through the construktion of Socialism and Approaching Communism Build with Conviction and Endurance through Martyrdom […] Long Live the Great Leeder [sic: vozhd] of the Proletarian Revolution c[omrade] Stalin.” TsGA-SPb., f. 7834, op. 33, d. 76,1. 12.

35. Quotation from Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca, 2002), xix. For further work in the field of cultural anthropology emphasizing the dialogic relationship between the material world and human actors, see Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, Eng., 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patico, Jennifer, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, 2008)Google Scholar; Miller, Daniel, ed., Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective (Oxford, 2009).Google Scholar

36. “Ustav Stroitel'nyi,” article 90, point 3, reprinted in D. Mordukhai-Boltovskii, ed., Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1912), vol. 12, pt. 1, 220.

37. “O predostavlenii eparkhial'nym Arkhereiam prava samim razreshat’ postroiku, perestroiku i rasprostranenie sobornykh, prikhodskikh, kladbishchenskikh tserkvei v gorodakh, krome stolits,” Synodal ukase of 29 July 1865, no. 42349, PSZ, 2d series, vol. 40, cols. 830-31. Although directed at places outside the capitals, the ukase enshrined the principles traditionally in use there, too.

38. According to a Synodal Instruction of 1857, “if churches are so dilapidated that they have started to list because of rotten timbers, have leaks, and threaten collapse, or at the very least, are in such a dilapidated condition that they make a most holy place unfit to be seen,” parishioners were to be directed to exert themselves to construct a new church. Sokhranenie dokumentov tserkovnoi stariny v Rossii v XVIII-nachala XX w. Sbornik dokumentov, ed. V. S. Dediukhina et al. (Moscow, 1997), doc. nos. 73, 94.

39. Cf. the reference to the “renewal of ancient paintings in a certain cathedral without the solicitation of permission” in the Synodal ukase of 31 December 1842, no. 16401, PSZ, 2d series, vol. 17, col. 288.

40. Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Raboche-Krest'ianskogo Pravitel'stua, no. 62 (1918), st. 685, 764-65.

41. Instruktsiya po uchetu, khraneniiu i peredache religioznogo imushchestva, imeiushchego istoricheskoe, khudozhestvennoe ili arkheologicheskoe znachenie (Moscow, 1920). GA RF, f. 2307, op. 3, d. 19,11. 28-33. For the 1924 and 1933 legislation, see Okhrana pamiatnikov istorii i kul'tury: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1973), 43, 60.

42. Leningrad—obraztsovyi sotsialisticheskii gorod: Novostroiki 1932 goda, issue 1 [all that was published] (Leningrad, 1932), 11.

43. “Nashi zadachi,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 1 (1933): 1. Emphasis in the original.

44. Il'in, L., “Ansambl’ v arkhitekturnom oblike Leningrada,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 2 (1933): 9–11.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 9.

46. “Spisok otdel'no stoiashchikh tserkvei priniatykh pod okhranu Osoboi Komissii Restavratsionnogo P[od]otdela (vPetrograde),“TsGA-SPb., f. 1001, op. 8, d. 13,1. 84. The list is undated, but a stamped date on it reads 6 June 1923. See also Appendix. This is the earliest list that I have managed to trace in local or central archives, though a 1922 report from the Petrograd Museums Department to Glavnauka indicates that in 1919, 23 parish churches were surveyed, and 3 registered as deserving preservation, while 200 chapels (domovye tserkvi) in public buildings were surveyed, 13 of which were registered. GA RF, f. 2307, op. 3, d. 272,1. 130ob.

47. “Spisok zdanii kul'ta v g. Leningrade nakhodiashchikhsia pod gosudarstvennoi okhranoi” [1927], Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv nauchno-tekhnicheskoi dokumentatsii Sankt-Peterburga (TsGANTD-SPb.), f. 192, op. 3-1, d. 9277, 11. 459-62. See also Appendix.

48. “Spisok otdel'no stoiashchikh tserkvei.” The dates and attributions that I give here follow the 1927 “Spisok zdanii kul'ta” and differ in some cases from modern ones: for instance, the Church of the Mother of God Joy of Those Who Grieve is now usually attributed to Ruska and dated 1817-1818. For a similar list in the papers of the Old St. Petersburg Society, see “Spisok arkhitekturnykh (tserkovnykh) sooruzhenii,” Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva Sankt-Peterburga (TsGALI-SPb.), f. 32, op. 1, d. 30, 1. 60, though this contains some differences in the order of the lower-ranking churches (for instance, the Church of St. Catherine on Vasilievskii Island; the list also includes two extra churches). See also Appendix. Sobor is often translated as “cathedral,” but strictly this would be kafedral'nyi sobor. In the 1920s, the title sobor was given to a number of buildings (e.g., the St. Matthew Church on the Petrograd Side) that had not formerly held the tide, partly as a result of the division of the Orthodox faithful into a variety of competing groups, encouraged by the Soviet authorities on a “divide and rule” basis. See Roslof, Red Priests.

49. I have not come across documentation setting out the motives behind the reduction in the list. Unlike the decrees stipulating that buildings be protected, the detail of planning policy was not in the public domain (to this day, researchers at the archive of the Monuments Office in St. Petersburg [NA UGIOP] are allowed to order only material relating to specific buildings, not protocols of meetings or directives, etc.). I would construe that, apart from the desire to give city planners a free hand when reconstructing urban space (on which see further below), another issue was budgetary—and in particular, the desire to reduce the number of protected buildings for whose upkeep central state bodies were directly responsible.

50. “Tsirkuliar NKP po Glavnauke vsem krai-, obi- i gubono i muzeinym p/otdelam pri nikh, No. 500/002/66 ot 17/1 1928 g.,” Biulleten’ Narkomprosa, 17January 1928.

51. “Spisok arkhitekturnykh pamiatnikov g. Leningrada, sostoiashchikh pod Gosudarstvennoi Okhranoi,” TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 61,11. 78-87ob. See also Appendix.

52. “Tsirkuliar NKP po Glavnauke.“

53. “Spisok pustuiushchikh tserkvei, sostavlennyi na osnovanii dannykh Administrativnogo otdela Leningradskogo oblastnogo ispolkoma,” (30 November 1928), TsGA-SPb., f. 3199, op. 2, d. 428, 1.6.

54. TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 4,1. 112.

55. “O poriadke sniatiia zontov nad vkhodnymi dver'mi,” Postanovlenie Prezidiuma Lenoblispolkoma i Leningradskogo soveta, 29 February 1932, Vestnik Leningradskogo Oblispolkoma i Leningradskogo soveta 20 (1932): 1.

56. Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel'stva RSFSR 35 (1929): 353.

57. Vestnik Leningradskogo Oblispolkoma i Leningradskogo Soveta 64 (1931): 3.

58. See “Spisok namechennykh k zakrytiiu tserkovnykh zdanii” (1932), TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 2, d. 50,11. 11-16. See also Appendix.

59. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 38,11. 4-5, 6-11. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 60, 11. 1-23 lists 137 closed churches from 1917 to 1936, including the outskirts of Leningrad (Prigorodnyi raion).

60. “Doklad Inspektora kul'tov Petroraisoveta po voprosu snosa Matveevskoi tserkvi,” TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 40,1. 93.

61. “Zaiavlenie Zam. Zav. LenGorONO i Zav. Stroisektorom LenGorONO,” 10 May 1933, TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 50, d. 33,1. 17. Emphasis in the original. The rendering here attempts to capture the awkward style of the original. The Russian phrase tol'ko polemoi ploshchadi literally means “useful space alone“—that is, not including sanitary facilities, kitchens, and so on.

62. See the remarks in Antonov and Kobak, Sviatyni.

63. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 39, 1. 41. When the church was finally closed in 1937, the reasons given were equally hypocritical: at a preliminary discussion, none of the officials in the Commission on the Affairs of Cults could find a suitable “culturaleducational” use for the place (someone half-heartedly suggested a planetarium), but the grounds given to VTsIK were that it was essential for the city archive. Eventually, the church was actually assigned to an electrical workshop. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 168, 11. 82, 157, 178, 188. On the history of the military churches of St. Petersburg and their dismal fate after 1917, see especially Andrei lu. Gusarov, Pamiatniki voinskoi slavy Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 2010).

64. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 39, 1. 21; cf. 11. 10-24 passim. There is similar material on the Church of St. Michael Archangel in Kolomna, whose liquidation was said to have been “insisted upon in a whole list of instructions to Lensovet by all the nearby industrial concerns.” See ibid., 11. 7, 9-10. On the rising importance of the defense industry at this period, see Shcherba, A. N., Voennaia promyshlennost’ Leningrada v 20-30-e gody (St. Petersburg, 1999).Google Scholar

65. For detailed accounts of the league's activities, see Lebina, N. B., “Deiatel'nost’ ‘voinstvuiushchikh bezbozhnikov’ i ikh sud'ba,” Voprosy istorii 5-6 (1996): 154-57Google Scholar; I. N. Donina, “Obyknovennyi ateizm,” Klio 8 (82) (2008) (my thanks to Aleksandr Burov for providing me with a copy of the latter text). Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998), emphasizes the unusually active work of the Leningrad league.

66. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 13, d. 92, 11. 222, 82. For an example of a “Leningrad” objector, see the text by P. Marov (“worker at the okhta [sic] chemical factory“), 1. 49: “It's interesting that the believers and admirers of this holiday are old women and provincials [crossed out] and incomers from nearby villages there are very few workers.” “St. Il'ia's Friday” is mentioned in prerevolutionary sources (for example, Il'ia Goncharov's essay “Slugi“), but it is not clear at which point the “healing of the possessed” ritual began. In Russian folk religion, St. Il'ia's Day is traditionally a day for casting out demons. My thanks to Al'bert Baiburin for this information. “St. Il'ia's Friday” is not the typical phrasing, however. It appears to have been generated by a confusion between the usual title of St. Paraskeva, “Piatnitsa,” or “Friday,” and the actual day of the week—encouraged by the fact that the Chapel of St. Paraskeva was a dependency of the Church of St. Il'ia in Porokhovye.

67. A. Tyrkova-Williams, Vospominaniia (1954; Moscow, 1998), 242.

68. Vladimir Kurbatov, Peterburg: Khudozhestvenno-istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1913), at http://www.naslethe-rus.ru/red_port/00302.php (last accessed 21 September 2012). The “cockerel style” (petushinyi stil’) refers to the decorative red brick that was used for many late nineteenth-century public buildings, including churches.

69. Nikolai Punin, Mir svetel liubov'iu:Dnevniki, pis'ma, ed. L. A. Zykov (Moscow, 1998), 242. The “cathedral” in question was probably either the Cathedral of the Transfiguration or the late eighteenth-century Cathedral of St. Sergius, both of which were not far from Punin's apartment behind the Sheremet'ev Palace.

70. On the “Petersburg text,” see particularly V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i ‘Peterburgskii tekst’ russkoi literatury” (1971, 1993), Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg, 2003), 7-118. Examples of scenes in churches to satirical ends include Pushkin's “From Pindemonte” (where an armed guard watches over the image of the Crucifixion), Gogol“s The Nose (where Kovalev glimpses the escaped nose saying his prayers “very piously“), and Lev Tolstoi's Father Sergius (where the worldly monastery in which Kasatskii is ordained is clearly intended as a portrait of the Aleksandr Nevskii Lavra).

71. B. M. Eikhenbaum, “Dusha Moskvy,” Sovremennoe slovo 1 (1917), at http://www.philologos.narod.ru/eichenbaum/eichen_moscow.htm (last accessed 21 September 2012).

72. This point is unlikely to derive simply from the nature of Leningrad preservationism, since Moscow and the old Russian cities had vigorous movements before 1917 and also in the 1920s. See Kaulen, Marina E., Muzei-khramy i muzei-monastyri v pervye desiatiletiia sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 2001)Google Scholar; Shchenkov, A. S., ed., Pamiatniki arkhitektury v Sovetskom Soiuze: Ocherhi istorii arkhitekturnoi restavratsii (Moscow, 2004).Google Scholar

73. The enormous Gutuevskaia Church on Obvodnyi Canal was scheduled for demolition in 1932 but then saved and returned to believers by VTsIK. See TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 38,1. 19.

74. Believers did not have the right to petition against the demolition of a church, only against its liquidation, so this lobbying group could exercise no leverage where the retention of former cultic buildings was concerned.

75. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 76,1. 31.

76. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 50,1. 12.

77. See the impassioned defense of the church's architectural value in TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 4,11. 95-95ob., 98.

78. Nauchnyi arkhiv Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi inspektsii okhrany pamiatnikov (NA UGIOP), papka 171 (Spaso-Preobrazhenskii sobor), t. 2, 11. 55-68, 79-103 (folios run in reverse chronological order).

79. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 39,1. 39.

80. TsGA-SPb., f. 3199, op. 2, d. 428,1. 7.

81. For example, first-category churches listed for demolition in 1932 (see Appendix) included “Kulich i Paskha” (the Church of the Trinity on what is now Prospect Obukhovskoi Oborony) and the Trinity Cathedral of the Izmailovskii Regiment, which, like the Church of the Nativity of St. John on Stone Island (second category) both survived. On the other hand, demolition of several third-category churches planned in 1932 did go ahead (e.g., the Church of the Transfiguration at the State Porcelain Factory and the Church of the Nativity in Peski). The demolition of the Church of the Sign in 1940 was peculiar in that the reason for its destruction was the construction of a metro station, a building of suitable gradostroitel'nyi eminence. It is tempting to regard stations as alternative “temples,” as AndrewJenks argues, though a comment by Lazar’ Kaganovich, “These aren't cathedrals, after all, but stations for an underground railroad,” suggests that the authorities specifically sought to play down this analogy. Jenks, “A Metro on the Mount: The Underground as a Church of Soviet Civilization,” Technology and Culture^], no. 4 (October 2000): 697-724; Kaganovich quote on 718.

82. See Lebina, “Deiatel'nost',” 55 (no sources are given for this assertion, but it is circumstantially likely, given the housing of antireligious museums in the city's two leading cathedrals, and the fact that the first director of the Museum of Religion and Atheism, N. Tian-Bogorazov, was one of the league's leaders).

83. TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 30,1. 34.

84. Ibid., 1. 36.

85. A rare exception was the dvadtsatka of the Church of the Presentation, Petrograd Side, who noted in an appeal to VTsIK in 1932 that their church was “one of the oldest buildings in Leningrad [it] has existed since 1793, is honored by the whole believing population of the district, and is under the supervision of Glavnauka.” TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 40,1. 2. This was one of numerous cases where the Monuments Office does not seem to have tried to save the building.

86. On the museum, see the documents from 1924 at TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 4, 11. 40, and from 1926 at TsGALI-SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 30,1. 45.

87. TsGA-SPb., f. 7179, op. 4, d. 25,1. 75.

88. Vestnik Leningradskogo oblispollwma i Leningradskogp soveta 73 (1931): 3 (“Prilozhenie No. 9 k Instruktsii…“).

89. This happened with the Church of St. Simeon and St. Anne: the presidium of Lensovet passed a resolution to hand over the place “for cultural ends” on 13 July 1937, but throughout the spring, summer, and early autumn of 1937, the Monuments Office was still insisting on repairs. See NA UGIOP, papka 173, t. 1,11. 130,144-51. It is also notable that the attitude of the Monuments Office to dvadtsatlci became notably tougher after 7 April 1929: before then, they had been prepared to be flexible when repairs were not done exactly to specification (see the episode in which they agreed to allow the dvadtsadca of St. Andrew's Cathedral on Vasilievskii Island to use oil-based, rather than water-based, paint for external decoration. NA UGIOP, papka 8/2,11. 35-37. My thanks to Aleksandra Piir for this reference).

90. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 40,1. 48. Emphasis in the original.

91. For the criticism, see “Nauchnyi passport b. Edinovercheskoi tserkvi (Muzeia Arktiki)” (1938), NA UGIOP, papka 481,1.1,1. 81.

92. NA UGIOP, papka 173, t. 1,11. 129, 57. In a similar vein, a plan for the restructuring of Haymarket Square dating from the 1930s proposed retaining the Church of the Savior but removing the domes and part of the bell tower so that it would resemble the former garrison prison (Gauptvakhta) opposite. Otdel rukopisei, Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, archive of E. A. Poliakova, f. 606, d. 127,1. 3.

93. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 163,1. 7-7 ob.

94. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 37,1. 42. Emphasis added.

95. At the same time, both churches were used as anticlerical museums: the Kazan’ Cathedral became the Museum of Religion and Atheism (the central such institution in the Soviet Union, which survives—renamed the Museum of Religion—to the present day, though in a different site on Pochtamtskii pereulok), and St. Isaac's Cathedral was used as the Anti-Religious Museum in 1931-1936, and thereafter retained some of its antireligious features, e.g., the Foucault pendulum.

96. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 163,1. 2.

97. TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 49, d. 40,1. 81. The final words, “my vsegda vsem organizatsiiam soobshchali po telefonu,” as well as the surnames of the officials Levitskaia talked to, have been added by hand to the typescript.

98. In 1930, Glavnauka was forced to explain that an expert carrying out an investigation of church contents in Ustiuzhniawas not colluding with believers. TsGA-SPb., f. 7179, op. 4, d. 25,1. 75.

99. Cf. the letter on file from 4 February 1933: “For the second time, the Bureau for the Protection of Monuments informs you that inasmuch as the Scientific Section of Narkompros has permitted the demolition of the Trinity Cathedral on Revolution Square, the bureau does not object, provided preliminary photo-documentation and a complete survey of the building is carried out to the specifications of the bureau.” TsGA-SPb., f. 1000, op. 50, d. 33,1. 24.

100. See the transcript of a broadcast by Radio Liberty, “Rossiia kak tsivilizatsiia— Restavrator,” presented by E. Ol'shanskaia, at http://www.archive.svoboda.org/programs/civil/2004/civil.032604.asp (accessed 7July 2009; no longer available).

101. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 74,11. 11-15.

102. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 50,1. 51.

103. Ibid., 1. 50.

104. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 163,1. 131.

105. Certainly, the main file on the church does not contain any representations from the Monuments Office at this point. TsGA-SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 163.

106. The new legislation of 1933 required a transfer of protected buildings to the immediate responsibility (balans) of the heritage authorities, but in practice, this was significandy delayed. In Leningrad, the issuing of new contracts by the Monuments Office began only in 1937-1938. See the materials from 1939 on the Museum of the Arctic in NAUGIOP, papka 481, t. 1,11. 76-77. The measure gave the Monuments Office more discretionary power on paper, since they now had the right to evict disobedient lessees. But in fact, the room for maneuver was small, since a powerful Soviet institution could perfecdy well appeal to a central ministry, e.g., defense, at the RSFSR or USSR level, over the heads of local officials, or simply ignore their requirements. At the time of transfer, many raised legal objections to the requirement to pay for maintenance. See ibid.

107. On this period, see K. Kelli [C. Kelly], ‘“Ispravliat” li istoriiu? Spory ob okhrane pamiatnikov v Leningrade 1960-1970-kh godov,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 2 (2009), at http://www.magazines.russ.ru/nz/2009/2/kk7.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).

108. That said, there were cases of loss here too. Two well-known secular structures demolished in the 1920s were the Ekateringof Palace and the Litovskii Castle. Both were in a decayed condition, however, and the latter, as the “Russian Bastille,” was ideologically inflammatory into the bargain. See Sankt-Peterburg: Entsiklopedicheskii skruar1, at http://www.encspb.ru (last accessed 21 September 2012).

109. It is widely reported that the destruction of some churches, for instance the Trinity Cadthedral on Revolution Square, was at Kirov's personal behest, because he did not want to pass them on his way to and from his apartment on Krasnykh Zor’ Street (later Kirovskii Prospect). This appears to be a legend, however, and in fact the party daily, Leningradskaia pravda, was far more concerned with the “technocratic” side of party ideology than with its “radical” side (as opposed to Krasnaia gazeta). But Kirov's commitment to all-out industrialization certainly acted as an encouragement to enterprises in need of extra space.

110. This might be supposed to be the case everywhere. In some historic cities, though, such as Novgorod, the situation was rather different, since historic churches were the focal point of postwar reconstruction projects. See Shchenkov, ed., Pamiatniki arhhitehtury v Sovetskom Soiuze.

111. This point was made to me by a St. Petersburger in her 40s, who remembers the pendulum from school trips. A similar fixture in the Paris Panthéon is now the main point of interest to tourists there.

112. Material relating to Glavnauka in GA RF (see esp. ff. 259, 353, 2306, 2307) suggests that relatively few places outside Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad had much in the way of active preservation work going on, but the Leningrad files in GA RF have little overlap with those held locally, showing that extensive regional work is needed before general conclusions can be drawn.

113. See Kelly, ‘“A Dissonant Note on the Neva.'“

114. There is a large and growing literature on such “socialist spaces“: see Kucher, Katharina, Der Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im Stalinismus 1928-1941 (Cologne, 2007)Google Scholar; Ruthers, Monica, Moskau bauen von Lenin bis Chruščev: Öffentliche Raüme zwischen Utopie, Terror und Alltag (Cologne, 2007)Google Scholar; Bittner, Stephen V., The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar; Bassin, Mark, Ely, Christopher, and Stockdale, Melissa T., eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in Spatial History (DeKalb, 2010)Google Scholar; Mēhilli, “The Socialist Design.“

115. See Baranov, N. V., “General'nyi plan razvitiia Leningrada,” in Baranov, N. V., ed., Leningrad (Moscow-Leningrad, 1943), 69–72.Google Scholar

116. The text “Postanovlenie Tsentral'nogo Komiteta KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR ot 4 noiabria 1955 goda No. 1871 ‘Ob ustranenii izlishestv v proektirovanii i stroitel'stve'” is available online at http://www.sovarch.ru/postanovlenie55/ (last accessed 21 September 2012).

117. Vladimir Papernyi, in his influential study of Soviet architecture, Kul'tura “Dva” (Ann Arbor, 1984), argued that the role of neoclassical influences on Stalin-era architecture had been much exaggerated, and it is notable that Arkhitektura SSSR cited many other prototypes as well, particularly gothic architecture (as well as the modern buildings and grands projets of the capitalist west).

118. On the emergence of a supraregional and supranational Soviet sense of space, see Widdis, Emma, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dobrenko, Evgeny and Naiman, Eric, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seatde, 2003)Google Scholar; and the various publications of Galina Orlova, e.g., “Istoriia s geografiei: Osobaia rol’ kart i fizicheskoi geografii v stalinskoi vremia,” at http://www.urokiistorii.ru/history/soc/2010/15/istoriya-s-geogranei (last accessed 21 September 2012).

119. In this context, it is interesting to note the emphasis in Soviet newspaper coverage of the late 1920s of the rubbish tip as a metaphor of the old-style city: see “Sanitarnoe litso Leningrada,” Krasnaia gazeta, 5 June 1929, 3. The rubbish tip precisely suggests an anarchically layered past that is only manageable by burning or burial.

120. For the coinage “speaking Bolshevik,” see Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).Google Scholar It is interesting that while the term bol'shevistskii iazyk (Bolshevik language) was widely used in Soviet culture, the term bol'shevistskaia arkhitektura (Bolshevik architecture) sounds completely unconvincing (a search of Runet produces only 3 examples, all of them modern, as opposed to 211 for bol'shevistskii iazyk and 1,520 for sotsialisticheskaia arkhitektura). The National Corpus of the Russian Language produces 4 hits for sotsialisticheskaia stroika, but none for bol'shevistskaia stroika. See http://www.russcorpora.ru (last accessed 21 September 2012).

121. Papernyi's division between “Culture 1” (streamlined, ascetic, rationalistic, antiorganic) and “Culture 2” (florid, decorative, responsive to organic forms, mythic) is an accurate reflection of the discourse in architecture journals, and of key Moscow building projects, but architectural practice did not observe this neat schematism—at any rate, beyond Moscow. Papernyi, Kul'tura “Dva”.