Saint Isaac’s Cathedral as a Political Space: Transformation of the Image and the Search for Interpretations before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917

Abstract

The article analyzes the problem of transformation of imperial political spaces in the historical context of the 19th – 20th centuries. The main attention in the article is focuses on the dominant of the architectural landscape of St. Petersburg – St. Isaac’s Cathedral. The struggle for its symbolic appropriation reflected the peripeteias of the socio-political development of tsarist, revolutionary and Soviet Russia. The article aims to study the process of transformation of symbolic meaning of St Isaac’s Cathedral and to analyze all comprehension models of that monument. The initial purpose of its construction was to honor the Russian monarchy, but after the Russian Revolution it required a new interpretation that would fit new realities. Based on numerous unpublished documents from the seven archives of St. Petersburg, the author concludes that before the Revolution St. Isaac’s Cathedral was marked on the symbolic map of Petrograd not only as a church but as a right-wing conservative political space, a visible monument glorifying the House of Romanov. The anti-monarchist revolution changed the fate of the building and its image forever. In the 1920s the perception of the cathedral caused a furious fight in society. It was a period of intense rivalry between three symbolic programs – exclusively church’s interpretation, interpretation of the cathedral as a monument of art, and antireligious model of the “anti-temple” – “the former St. Isaac’s Cathedral”.