Heritage at Risk: The Fate of Modernist Buildings in Russia

This article paints an overview of the preservation of twentieth-century architecture in Russia, arguing that, despite growing international concern over the survival of modernist buildings and growing expertise on their conservation, Russian preservation lags far behind the rest of the world. Dushkina describes the effects the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wave of private capital investment have had on architectural heritage, and how suspect methods of preservation—either reconstruction or façadism—have become popular in Moscow's heated real-estate market, even as critical preservation of the listed monuments of twentieth-century Russian architecture has faltered.