From the Del’vig House to the Gas-Scraper: The Fight to Preserve St. Petersburg

I am not the director of a museum but the mayor of a city.

—Valentina Matvienko, mayor of Petersburg

A person who does not love the historical monuments of his country does not love his country.

—Dmitrii Likhachev, activist and scholar of Old Russian literature

On 19 October 1986, demonstrators in Leningrad converged on the home of the Russian poet Anton Del’vig (1798–1831) to protest its imminent destruction. City authorities had decided to remove it to build a new subway station. Though little known abroad, Anton Del’vig is a much beloved cultural figure in Russia. He stood at the center of a literary circle that included the greatest poet of the era, Aleksandr Pushkin, and was Pushkin’s classmate at the famous Tsarskoe Selo Lycée that spawned several writers of Russia’s literary Golden Age. Del’vig had lived in the building at 1 Zagorodnyi Prospekt in the heart of the city for little more than a year, from late 1829 until his untimely death in early 1831, but it was there that he founded Russia’s most important literary journal, Literaturnaia gazeta, and hosted gatherings of the city’s most dazzling writers and thinkers. By some miracle the building had survived the wars and revolutions of the 20th century and become the focus of what would be the first successful mass protest against a government decision in late Soviet times.

Behind the effort stood a group of young historians, archeologists, and journalists who just a month earlier had formed a preservationist organization called the Rescue Squad (Gruppa spaseniia).¹ The initiative for their first action came from a recent graduate of Leningrad University’s School of Journalism, Tat’iana Likhanova. While working as a secretary at the Society for the Preservation of Historical Monuments, she learned of plans to raze Del’vig House and asked the archeologist and writer Sergei Vasil’ev to do something about it. Vasil’ev got together with his friend Aleksei Kovalev, a recent archeology graduate of Leningrad University, and they cofounded the Rescue Squad, mobilized its membership to gather signatures from scholars and found sympathetic journalists who placed stories in newspapers about the threat to the building. A street protest began on the anniversary of the founding in 1811 of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée to remind people of the illustrious writers associated with Del’vig House. Though riskier than a signature campaign, the street action had some official cover, as the organizers had exploited a split, typical of the perestroika era, between the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) in the city and provincial party leaders. So long as a recognized party body “guided” an action, it was considered legal, and the Komsomol decided, against the wishes of higher-ups, to endorse the demonstration and persuaded party leaders at the provincial level not to ban the action and risk provoking a bigger disturbance. As Tat’iana Likhanova, who had since become a prominent journalist specializing in historic preservation, explained to me in 2012, this and later demonstrations also benefited from street theater performances organized by the Petersburg Interior Theater, directed by Nikolai Beliak. For the Del’vig House action, Beliak stationed trumpeters dressed all in white on the roofs of nearby buildings, and they sounded their horns to attract the support of residents and passers-by. An actor appeared on the balcony of the Del’vig House and read a speech by Aleksandr Kunitsyn, a liberal professor of law who had taught at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée when Pushkin and Del’vig studied there. The demonstrators sang the farewell anthem of the Lycée, written by Del’vig. The protest continued for a month until the local authorities relented and agreed to relocate the subway station.²

If this successful action by the Rescue Squad marked a new stage in popular efforts at historic preservation, it was not without precedent.³ This new generation of activists was building on a revival in the late 1950s of the Russian tradition of local history (kraevedenie), which under...