The Golden Age of Soviet Heritage: An Alternative Presentism

This chapter focuses on one aspect of the new heritage regime that developed under Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary of the CPSU, 1964–82): the inflation of Soviet heritage or, to put it another way, the increasing heritagisation of Soviet materiality. This dynamic is apparent in three concurrent phenomena that I trace in the context of Soviet Russia: the sudden increase of heritage designations for objects related to a certain version of Soviet history; the birth of Soviet industrial heritage; and the unprecedented heritagisation of Soviet architecture. The chapter examines how the rise of presentism in late Soviet Russia influenced heritage discourses, experiences, and practices, and how Soviet heritage production reflected the evolving interrelations between past, present, and future. Indeed, this new relation to Soviet materiality was both a symptom and an answer to a change in the temporal culture, which tended to what I designate as “Soviet presentism,” building upon François Hartog’s significant contribution to the philosophy of history. This chapter thereby pluralises our understanding of presentism, complexifies the history of heritage in the twentieth century, and offers a reevaluation of the temporal dimensions of the late Soviet material heritage protection regime.