The chapter examines the activities of architect-conservators in Soviet Leningrad towards the preservation of the city’s churches. Arbitrating in the name of nauka (scholarship and science), they risked censure, on the one hand, from believers, insofar as they decreed certain churches not to be worth preserving, and on the other, censure for covert support for ‘obscurantism’ in impeding the plans of developers for destruction or reconstruction of churches considered to be emblems of the city’s heritage. Defending the claims of nauka, they opposed themselves both to demands for wholesale destruction and for indiscriminate retention. The chapter concludes that widespread claims that the project of secularisation in Russia and the former Soviet Union was a ‘failure’ should be offset against the striking success of Leningrad’s architect-conservators in pushing through their vision of how historic churches should be used—with respect above all for their aesthetic and architectural features—to preserve Russia’s heritage rather than their religious function.
...MoreBook Paul Betts; Stephen A. Smith (2016) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe.
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