Chronicles in Stone

Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia

Victoria Donovan

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501747885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Chronicles in Stone is a study of the powerful and pervasive myth of the Russian Northwest, its role in forming Soviet and Russian identities, and its impact on local communities. Combining detailed archival research, participant observation and oral history work, it explores the transformation of three northwestern Russian towns from provincial backwaters into the symbolic homelands of the Soviet and Russian nations.

The book's central argument is that the Soviet state exploited the cultural heritage of the Northwest to craft patriotic narratives of the people's genius, heroism and strength that could bind the nation together after 1945. Through sustained engagement with local voices, it reveals the ways these narratives were internalized, revised, and resisted by the communities living in the region.

Donovan provides an alternative lens through which to view the rise of Russian patriotic consciousness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, adding a valuable regional dimension to our knowledge of Russian nation building and identity politics.

1.

PHOENIXES FROM THE ASHES

Postwar Reconstruction as a Patriotic Duty

The occupation and recapture of the Russian Northwest during World War II resulted in the catastrophic devastation of the region’s architectural landscape. The iconic onion domes crowning Orthodox churches and cathedrals were punctured by bombing and stripped of their gold leaf, thick medieval walls were pitted by gunfire, and, in some cases, entire monastery complexes were reduced to ashes and rubble. On returning to the region after the war, Soviet officials and restorers were consequently confronted with a difficult decision. At a time of grave political and economic crisis, when residents all over the Soviet Union were in dire need of housing, food, and warmth, could the restoration of old buildings be justified? And, if so, what was to be built in place of the churches and monasteries that had been destroyed? New monuments to the victorious communist regime? Pastiches of old buildings? Or, most expensive and time-consuming of all, scientific reconstructions of the Orthodox architecture that had for centuries defined the historic region?

The Northwest was not alone in facing the dilemmas of postwar reconstruction. The first decades after 1945 saw politicians across Europe debate the merits of heritage objects and their place on the historic landscape. Political authorities in “liberated” Poland thus upheld the need to “de-Germanize” city silhouettes, removing “foreign” structures and foregrounding the relics of alternative Polish, Baltic, or Dutch pasts.¹ The delicate question of heritage preservation in postwar Germany provoked a variety of responses, from modernization in the West to the preservation of historic ruins in the more conservative South.² Within the Soviet Union itself strategies of reconstruction varied considerably: the Belarusian capital of Minsk, where wartime bombing had destroyed 70 percent of the housing stock and 80 percent of the urban infrastructure, was rebuilt as an entirely new city, with little acknowledgment of the former structure and architectural content of the prewar town.³ War-ravaged Sevastopol, by contrast, became a high-profile urban reconstruction project. As Karl Qualls has shown, the political center wished to transform the city into an open-air museum of military victory, though this vision was resisted and reshaped by local architects and officials.⁴

The formerly occupied territories of Novgorod and Pskov, however, presented a special case. During the late Stalinist era of Russocentric Soviet patriotism, the reconstruction of the historic region became a flagship project to bolster social solidarity and national unity within the war-ravaged communist state.⁵ Despite the financial exigencies of reconstruction, local restoration workshops were established as soon as the war was over. The workshops were tasked with rebuilding the towns and restoring them to their former architectural glory. Historic monuments, rising from the ashes of conflict, were to constitute symbols of popular defiance against the perceived intentions of the Nazis to destroy all traces of Slavic culture. The Northwest was to form a focus of postwar patriotism that exhibited both the primacy of Russian culture and traditions and the resilience and heroism of the postwar Soviet state.

Heritage under Enemy Occupation

The specificities of postwar reconstruction must be seen through the lens of wartime occupation. Both Novgorod and Pskov were invaded by Nazi forces in summer 1941, during the first phase of the German “Operation Barbarossa,” and recaptured by the Red Army in January and July 1944, respectively. Novgorod’s location for the duration of the war was catastrophic in terms of the preservation of its architectural landscape. During its two-and-a-half-year occupation, the town was located just two kilometers from the front line beyond the Malyi Volkhovets River, where the Red Army had retreated in 1941.⁶ This position on the very edge of the Eastern Front meant that the town’s historic buildings were adapted for the purposes of battle: belfries became lookouts for approaching enemy attacks, while the thick walls of medieval churches created ramparts against incoming fire.⁷

Pskov was occupied in July 1941, following the Nazi Army Group North’s attack on the Soviet Northwestern Front, the primary objective of which was the capture of Leningrad. Following the establishment of the Leningrad Blockade, Pskov became the “North” Group’s command center, housing a number of strategic military facilities, including the unit’s administrative inspectorate, hospitals, and military intelligence schools.⁸ The town remained a strategic stronghold throughout the war, providing a base for German field marshals and generals who were housed in the medieval Snetogorsk Monastery several kilometers from the center.⁹ As in Novgorod, the town’s historic architecture was adapted for military purposes: the Snetogorsk Monastery, for instance, was fitted with a modern sanitation system, along with luxuries such as fireplaces, a wine cellar, and even a shooting range.¹⁰

Architectural heritage was immediately invoked in the propaganda war between the Soviet and Nazi military forces. The region’s numerous medieval churches, whose spiritual role had been suspended following the Bolshevik Revolution, became the focus of German efforts to win the sympathies of the local population. The German propagandist publication “Northern Word” in Novgorod thus painted the Nazis as the “saviors of Christian values from the Bolshevik barbarians” and asserted that the church architecture that had been ravaged by the Soviets would be properly maintained under German rule.¹¹ The Red Army likewise seized on the mobilizational potential of Russia’s historic heritage. Partisan-distributed publications instructed locals not to believe the “fascist lies” and to look instead at the harm caused by the occupiers to the St. Sophia Cathedral and other historic buildings to determine the Germans’ real appreciation of local culture and traditions.¹²

In Pskov, an important role in the propaganda war was played by the “Pskov Orthodox Mission,” a Riga-based operation headed by the Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Baltic States, Metropolitan Sergii (Voskresenskii).¹³ The mission collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces with the ostensible aim of reviving spiritual life in the lands that had been “liberated” from Bolshevik rule. During its two-and-a-half-year residency in Pskov, the mission restored and reopened many of the churches and shrines that had been closed and desecrated by the Bolshevik regime. Indeed, according to Johannes Due Enstad, 220 churches were reopened in the region within the first year of the mission’s arrival in Pskov.¹⁴ Locals were reported to have participated enthusiastically in this activity, offering donations in the form of building materials, liturgical articles, and vestments that they had hidden for safekeeping from the atheist Soviet state.¹⁵

It should be noted that the destruction of local heritage in Novgorod and Pskov was not the exclusive result of Nazi efforts to “wipe Russian culture from the face of the earth,” as postwar Soviet historians would later have it.¹⁶ Unlike the British raids on Lübeck and Rostock, described as the first “overt indiscriminate bombing of a town centre with little military or industrial significance,”¹⁷ or the Luftwaffe’s retaliatory Baedeker raids on Exeter, Bath, Canterbury, and other locations, the damage inflicted on the heritage of the Northwest was largely incidental. Indeed, Soviet forces themselves caused much harm to local monuments in their efforts to free the region from Nazi control.¹⁸ This fact, however, would be strategically forgotten in the process of crafting a triumphalist narrative of war in the first decades after 1945. The war-ravaged heritage of the Russian Northwest would emerge at this time as a symbol of collective suffering and resilience in the face of Nazi brutality and barbarism.

Graveyards without Headstones

The architectural devastation of the occupied Northwest was nearly total by the end of the war. The sustained fighting and violence that had accompanied the region’s invasion by German forces and recapture by the Soviets had wrecked local infrastructure and razed the historic landscape. In a report on conditions in postwar Novgorod published in 1944, it was consequently noted that just forty out of 2,346 residential buildings had been left unscathed by fighting.¹⁹ A General Act of March 1945 confirmed the extent of local damage, reporting that all of the town’s hospitals, schools, libraries, and museums had been destroyed, as had all local industry, waterworks, and power plants.²⁰ Retreating German troops had even mined the infrastructural hubs around the central Great Moscow Street and the bridge across the Volkhov River leading to the kremlin, completing the picture of destruction.²¹

The most shocking aspect of Novgorod’s occupation, however, was the nearly total devastation of the town’s heritage landscape. According to one report produced by local authorities, sixty-five architectural monuments had been destroyed or badly damaged as a result of wartime bombing, while many other historic buildings were in a state of severe dilapidation by the end of the war.²² The ruination of the town’s medieval landscape made Novgorod unrecognizable to many who returned home from evacuation after 1944. The medieval historian Dmitry Likhachev, an enthusiast for Novgorod’s culture and architecture, visited the town soon after its liberation.²³ In an article-memoir written some decades later, he described the impression created by the city’s landscape of eviscerated medieval monuments:

[Novgorod] was covered by a deafening silence. A dead silence stopped my ears. It seemed to me that I was not only deaf, but blind as well. I no longer saw the town once so familiar to me. Under the tragically large sky there was just a flat plain, overgrown with high grass. It was a graveyard without headstones! Here and there, there was the odd remnant of an ancient church. Their thick walls were deeply wounded, but they had survived, stood their ground. The churches and monasteries in the wide ring surrounding Novgorod were not so lucky—they had been flattened on the battlefield. Volotovo, Kovalevo, Skovorodka—so many names familiar to the art historian. All had perished!²⁴

Pskov’s experience of wartime occupation, unlike that of Novgorod, had been relatively peaceful. Located away from the front line, and serving as a strategic outpost for the German army, the city was well preserved until the moment of its recapture from Nazi occupation.²⁵ In the fighting that accompanied the Red Army’s advance on the region in 1944, however, much of the city was engulfed by fire. Many of the town’s administrative buildings were destroyed at this time, including the House of the Red Army, the Pskov State Museum building, the city’s main hotel, several schools and colleges, the Pushkin Theater, and two cinemas.²⁶ As they had done in Novgorod, the retreating German troops mined hubs of local infrastructure. The town’s main railway station, two railway administration buildings, and the bridges over the River Velikii and the River Pskov were all destroyed as a result.²⁷

Pskov likewise experienced severe damage to its heritage landscape during its years of wartime occupation. Among the architectural victims of wartime fighting were the town’s seventeenth-century merchant palaces: the Pogankin Palaces, Pechenko House, and Tiunsk Palace, the latter of which was completely destroyed by fire. Shelling damaged the valuable fresco paintings of the twelfth-century Mirozhsk Monastery and reduced to ruins the St. John’s Monastery Cathedral (1243), among others.²⁸ During their retreat from Pskov German troops had likewise mined the area around the Trinity Cathedral, though meticulous deactivation by Soviet forces prevented further damage. The final tally of the destruction was staggering. On visiting the town in 1945, a Soviet commission estimated that 3,748,957,130 rubles worth of damage had been caused to the city’s monuments, while the total cost of wartime fighting was calculated at a massive 26,376,128,531 rubles.²⁹

Ruins as Wartime Propaganda

The Soviet state was quick to capitalize on the ruins of war as a means of mobilization for political purposes. As early as 1942 the revealingly named Emergency State Commission for the Investigation of the Villainy of the German-Fascist Occupiers was established to monitor and document the material damage inflicted on the occupied territories. The commission was made up of academics, writers, journalists, and museum workers, who visited the occupied regions of Novgorod, Pskov, and Kiev, among others, photographing and reporting on the localities’ damaged historical monuments.³⁰ Commission reports were packaged for public consumption in the form of exhibitions, lectures, and glossy publications. Gutted medieva...