Steven Maddox. Saving Stalin’s Imperial City

Saving Stalin’s Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930–1950, which focuses on the years in which the Soviet Union was embroiled in World War II and the postwar period, represents a significant addition to existing scholarship on the history of St. Petersburg/Leningrad and preservation efforts in the city. Steven Maddox’s well-researched monograph provides a convincing explanation for the Stalinist state’s counterintuitive decision, following the end of World War II, to spend vast resources on reconstructing historical monuments, including the imperial summer palaces located in the suburbs around St. Petersburg, when other problems (rebuilding housing stock decimated during the war and restoring industrial and agricultural production in formerly occupied territory) might have seemed more politically and economically pressing. Connecting the effort to the Soviet Union’s patriotic “turn to the past”—the “growing reverence for great figures and events from the prerevolutionary period” that emerged as a dominant feature of Soviet culture in the 1930s (7)— Maddox argues that Soviet leaders saw reconstructing prerevolutionary architectural monuments as an important tool for cultivating patriotism and countering potentially destabilizing elements at home. Party authorities, he suggests, believed that leaving the city’s landmarks and historical monuments in ruins would be equivalent to conceding to the Germans and hoped that restoration would raise morale and testify to the power of the Soviet state and Communist Party. He notes that in the first years after the end of World War II, Leningrad officials and party activists worked hard to ensure that the Soviet public understood the prescribed meanings embedded in the completed restoration projects and commemorations of wartime sacrifices and achievements. They used guided tours, newspaper articles, museum exhibits, and workplace discussions with veterans and blockade survivors to convey the correct messages.

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