“Every Centimeter of this Ground is History”

This chapter draws on oral testimony and participant observation work conducted in the 2000s and 2010s to explore how Soviet and Russian patriotic discourses rooted in the heritage landscape were internalized by communities living in the historic towns. It focuses on the different oral modes employed by residents to speak about local heritage: the routinized discourse of kraevedenie lectures and touristic excursions and the more intimate language associated with memories of childhood, family festivities, and domestic traditions. The chapter examines the human consequences of the shifts in heritage politics that followed the collapse of communist rule. According to its findings, the experience of living among architectural monuments gave rise to proprietorial feelings about heritage. This provoked a range of emotions, from pride to frustration, and even melancholy in connection with the contemporary fate of these buildings.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the Russian Northwest and its role in imagining Soviet-Russian nationhood. Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda here served as symbolic homelands for the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian nations, mediating between the local, national, and transnational. Following the war, the state marketed the region's cultural heritage to the nation as the symbols of Russified Soviet identity linked to myths of sacredness, sacrifice, and patriotism. The idea of the Northwest was placed at the center of everyday life, emerging as a center of tourism and cultural activity in the 1960s to 1980s. The region thus formed a vehicle for internalizing the impersonal nation by placing it within the familiar local world, or a site where local and national memory could be fused.