From the Delvig House to the “Gas-Scraper”: The Fight to Preserve St. Petersburg

The Gorbachev liberalization released a surge of popular interest in local history in Russia. The interest was especially intense in Leningrad, the former capital of the Russian empire, resplendent with cultural monuments. Communist leaders had shuttered societies of local history and culture in the 1930s and stifled efforts to recall past glories of the city and to preserve buildings that stood in the way of plans to reshape the urban landscape. The new policy of “openness” (glasnost’) allowed a grassroots movement of historic preservation to arise in defense of the former imperial capital’s unique heritage. But the new freedom likewise opened opportunities for urban development, first by local officials eager to share in opportunities for joint enterprise profits and, after 1991, by investors, contractors, and their political allies. People who wanted to preserve the historic look of the city realized that they would have to join together to resist its transformation. David Ransel follows the emergence of the preservationist organizations in protest against demolition of the Del’vig House in 1986 and their continuing battles to save the city’s historic center, culminating in a successful effort in the 2000s to halt construction of a Gazprom business complex dominated by a 400 meter tower. 

David L. Ransel is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. He has published nine books, including four monographs, and several dozen articles on topics in Russian political, social and oral history. Ransel served as editor-in-chief of the Slavic Review 1980-85 and editor-in-chief of the American Historical Review 1985-95. From 1995 to 2009 he was director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University. He served as president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2004. He is currently at work on an oral history study of civic identity and social attachments of the last Soviet and first post-Soviet generations of workers in the industrial suburbs of Moscow.