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Speaker(s): Catriona Kelly, Oxford University

Studies of what came to be known in the 1960s as “the city on the Neva” (as a way of circumventing problems about what name to call it by), or informally “Piter”, often present the issue of local memory according to the model of suppression, during the Soviet period, of the city’s authentic past, whether that be its pre-revolutionary history, its place in world culture, or the history of wartime suffering under the Blockade. My work on Leningrad and St Petersburg argues, rather, that the city’s past as it is now understood was, in signal respects, actively created during the Soviet period, and especially during the post-Stalin era. A pivotal point was Khrushchev’s 1954 speech to the combined plenary of the City and Regional Committees of the Communist Party, in which he described the “Leningrad Affair” as a fabrication. This was followed by an “extraordinary” jubilee of the city in 1957, and by a surge of interest in its local characteristics, particularly from the late 1960s. In articles published so far, I have discussed, for instance, the history of architectural heritage preservation in the 1960s, and the expansion of criteria so that larger and larger swathes of the past were protected (though not necessarily otherwise cared for). In this paper, I will look at the history of the city’s museums, arguing that it was not always the most internationally famous museums that played the most important role in a sense of “localness”, and also that the history of the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad (often referred to rather misleadingly as “the Blockade Museum”) was less straightforward than references to its suppression in 1949 as a result of the “Leningrad Affair” would suggest.

CATRIONA KELLY is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. Her publications on Russian culture include, most recently, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, which was awarded the Grace Abbott Prize of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero, as well as many other books and edited books, articles, reviews, and translations. She is currently completing work on a study of memory and local identity in Leningrad and St Petersburg since 1957.