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CONCLUSION t The preceding chapters have demonstrated the complex forces that bear upon the ruin in Russian society and the diverse ways in which ruins are pressed into service as material evidence and symbolic argument in the context of various cultural debates. The conditions for the recognition of ruins were not auspicious. The absence of antique ruins (at least until some were physically imported during the eighteenth century and the Crimea was annexed in 1787) and the scarcity of medieval stone architecture meant that until the advent of modern times, Russia was largely bereft of ruins. Although such things are impossible to quantify, it is fair to say that in the daily experience of most Russians, catastrophes—whether human-induced (such as wars, revolutions, drastic cultural upheavals, political repression, economic collapse) or “acts of God” (flooding, fire, poor harvest, etc.) have been all too frequent, and the sense of vulnerability resulting from this fact of life has never entirely subsided. It is important to bear in mind that in Russian history, with the exception of a narrow elite stratum located in the two capitals and some better-off provincial cities, ruins arise against a background of overwhelming poverty, which is, of course, more conducive to looting than to preservation. The reification of ruins as intrinsically valuable artifacts is emphatically an urban, upperclass phenomenon. Already Ippolit Bogdanovich, the translator of Voltaire’s “Poem on the Disaster in Lisbon,” had demonstrated a keen sense of the suffering that accompanies ruination. His translation expressed the powerlessness he felt in light of the catastrophe, the inability of any knowledge or system of thought to come to terms with the devastation. Reflecting on the purpose of representing the calamity, he implied that poetry derives legitimacy from calling for compassion and from sustaining the memory of those somber days. The commemorative function of representation complicates the aesthetic appreciation of ruins. It underpins much of Russia’s use of ruins. We saw that Nikolai Karamzin, for example, approached ruins as the distressing memorial of Russia’s suffering at the hands of foreign invaders . And much more recently, Grigorii Revzin has based his case for 220 Architecture of Oblivion the value of ruins on their commemorative value, as the memorial of a catastrophe and as a sacred object that no longer exists (physically), yet endures (metaphysically).1 Yet, what is just as characteristic of Russian culture, and perhaps more surprising, is the equally strong pull to dismantle the ruin in order to overcome the past. Both in 1812 in Moscow and in 1945 in Leningrad (and many other examples could be adduced), the response to the devastation has been largely to restore, if not replicate, the status quo ante, with some minor concessions to practical necessities, but without any perceived need for preserving a visual record of the devastation. In this regard, the practice contrasts with memorialization in England and Germany after World War II, where the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in England (along with many more minor churches) and of the steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche in Berlin have been conserved, stabilized, and integrated with an adjacent modernist church. The ideological import of such reconstruction is the celebration of the Russian state. For replicas of destroyed buildings loudly proclaim not only that the people have prevailed over foreign attacks, but also that the state could confidently invest sufficient resources to restore the prewar appearance of the urban environment. It is not that the memory of the catastrophe is to be erased entirely, for it is sustained by other means, such as official anniversary celebrations, and Russia is awash with this sort of official memorialization. Rather, the past should not in any way restrict the prerogatives of the state in designing and maintaining the built environment . Nor should space escape the control of worldly authorities, a notion that puts heterogeneity and fragmentariness at risk. In many reconstruction projects, there has been an obsession with re-creating an integral, whole, and unified object, rather than in allowing the variegated effects of time to bear testimony. Many Russian rulers were builders at heart. Most saw the need to inscribe their power in stone, brick, or plaster. From Peter the Great to Joseph Stalin to Yuri Luzhkov, the imperatives of architectural self-fashioning seemed often to override other, more urgent needs.2 In the midst of the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, Catherine the Great saw fit to devote a considerable amount of time to matters of landscape...

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