Beyond Preservation: Post-Soviet Reconstructions of the Strelna and Tsaritsyno Palace-Parks

Abstract

This essay tells the story of two Russian imperial palace-parks – Petersburg’s Strelna and Moscow’s Tsaritsyno, both federally protected imperial heritage sites reclaimed from physical ruin in twenty-first century post-Soviet Russia. Both palace-parks were subjected to major, highly controversial reconstruction, and in their new incarnations now assert post-Soviet Russia’s status as the inheritor-heir of imperial Russian cultural property. Both projects also bring into sharp relief the terms of contemporary debate and cultural politics surrounding heritage and preservation in the two cities. During the early post-Soviet years, the Strelna and Tsaritsyno palaces lay in ruins as “couldhave-beens,” intriguingly suggestive of alternative histories. At the turn of the twenty-first century, as Vladimir Putin began his first term as Russian President and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov contemplated a second decade in office, Strelna and Tsaritsyno both offered ideal opportunities for the post-Soviet repurposing of cultural heritage – reclaiming the imperial past by fulfilling its unrealized promise, and reconstructing heritage with a creative hand. The major Russian imperial palace-parks in the environs of St. Petersburg (Tsarskoe Selo, Peterhof, etc.) are “classic” examples of Russian lieux de memoire, to use Pierre Nora’s famous term. To what extent, in what different ways, and to what effect do the new postSoviet versions of Strelna and Tsaritsyno assert their own status as Russian cultural lieux de memoire?