Corinne Geering

The practice of protecting and preserving cultural heritage has manifested itself as one of the most powerful symbolic instruments in contemporary identity politics. The initial emphasis on representing a national past was about to change when the international organisation UNESCO issued the World Heritage Convention in 1972, which acknowledged the universal value of certain sites as “heritage of mankind as a whole”. Ever since its inauguration, this claim of universality has been criticised for imposing a Eurocentric interpretation of heritage on the rest of the world. Both UNESCO in the “Global Strategy” (1994) and heritage scholars have addressed the global imbalance of inscriptions along the North-South divide and discussed alternative notions of heritage. However, the post-socialist states are fairly absent in these discussions despite the fact that the territory of the Soviet Union remained a blank space on the World Heritage map until the end of the Cold War. This dissertation project aims to integrate the post-Soviet area into the discourse on global heritage by analysing the inscription of the first World Heritage sites in the Russian Federation between 1988 and 1994.

Rather than partaking in UNESCO’s enterprise, the Republics of the Soviet Union had issued their own federal laws on the protection of cultural heritage as so-called museum-reserves (muzei-zapovedniki). These laws as well as publications by Soviet scholars perceived the museum-reserves to be an integral part of mirovoe kul’turnoe nasledie (eng. world cultural heritage) consistent with the Communist ideology. On the basis of primary material from regional Russian and UNESCO archives, this project asks why the USSR ratified the World Heritage Convention only in 1988 and how diverging interests of actors on the local, national and international level were negotiated in selecting the first Russian UNESCO World Heritage sites. Thereby, it seeks to analyse how the former Soviet notion of mirovoe kul’turnoe nasledie was re-evaluated and re-integrated into a new international setting as ‘World Heritage’. The abolition of Marxist-Leninist state ideology, the religious revival and intensified international collaboration shall be examined as major factors in this process of reinterpreting Russian cultural heritage.