Contentious Heritage: The Preservation of Churches and Temples in Communist and Post-Communist Russia and China

Abstract

Writing of Chinese temples in 2000, Vincent Goossaert commented: ‘From 1898 until today there has unfolded a century of continuous destruction, destruction by every means, which will remain as one of the greatest annihilations of a patrimony in human history’. 2 It is true that there were few more alarming instances in the twentieth century of governments waging war on their built heritage than the destruction of temples and other ancient monuments that took place in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 and, above all, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Yet a grim precedent for this had already been set in the Soviet Union, when in 1928-32, and again in1959-1964, a government campaign of closure and demolition of churches took place. This essay compares the policy of the two Communist states towards the maintenance of religious sites; it argues that notwithstanding bouts of annihilation, the policy of both the Soviet Union and the PRC towards these sites was rather more complex, indeed less consistently negative, than Goossaert’s comment suggests. In principle, both regimes were committed to the preservation of cultural heritage—if not steadfastly—and both recognized that religious buildings were a major element in that heritage. At the same time, the preservation of places of worship posed a particular challenge to these regimes, since it was precisely in this area that the commitment to maintain the national patrimony collided with the invariably stronger desire to build an industrial, urban, and socialist society freed from all religious belief. The first half of the essay compares the shifting policies of the Soviet Union and the PRC towards the preservation of religious buildings; the second half examines the extraordinary revival of churches and temples—as religious sites and as national monuments—that has taken place in the former Soviet Union since 1991 and in China in the so-called ‘reform era’ since the 1980s. The paper thus turns on a double comparison: a comparison between the respective policies of the Soviet and Chinese Communist governments towards the preservation and destruction of churches and temples; and a comparison between the policies of the Communist era and those that have typified post-Communist times. It focuses solely on religious sites of ethnic Russians and Han Chinese.