Protecting the heritage of humanity in the Cold War: UNESCO, the Soviet Union and sites of universal value, 1945–1970s

ABSTRACT

The concept of world heritage prevailed in international policies in the conflict-ridden Cold War period. In particular, UNESCO adopted measures to protect heritage sites of universal value; most notably, in the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972). Despite the growing interest in internationalism in heritage conservation, socialist states’ approaches for the protection of the heritage of humanity have largely been ignored in historical accounts. This article focuses on the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics’ (USSR) heritage diplomacy and discusses the socialist politics of world heritage. By drawing on published sources as well as documents from UNESCO and Russian archives, it shows how international conflict has spurred the development of international heritage policies in a divided world. It pays special attention to the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954), which reflected the understanding of heritage as an international security issue as maintained by experts from socialist countries. Thus, the Soviet internationalist heritage politics reveal the relevance of the Cold War conflict as a continuation of wartime measures in the development of world heritage and the diverging interpretations of this idea in the second half of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• World heritage
• heritage diplomacy
• wartime protection
• international law
• Cold War
• socialism

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by a doctoral scholarship and travel grants from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the University of Giessen, Germany. The author would like to thank Nelly Bekus, Kate Cowcher, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, the concept of the heritage of humanity refers to the vision about heritage of universal value belonging to all humanity (see Prodan 2016, 137). It is a component of the Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments (1931), the Hague Convention (1954), the World Heritage Convention (1972), and later, the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003).

2. In the period investigated in this article, the USSR National Commission for UNESCO did not have a committee dedicated to heritage or cultural cooperation. As a result, the activities of the Soviet Union in these fields are scattered across the committees for education, libraries, the Major Project on Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values, and for technical assistance (see Romanovskii, Sisakiian, and Vakhrushev 1966, 206).

3. In 1985, the United States and the United Kingdom withdrew from UNESCO in protest against increasing politicisation and bureaucratic inefficiency. This decision by representatives of one side of the Cold War conflict ended the antagonism that had shaped UNESCO’s activities for three decades.

4. This list included Moscow, Leningrad, Velikii Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov Velikii, Iaroslavlʹ, Vladimir, Suzdalʹ, Smolensk, Derbent (all RSFSR), Kyiv, Chernihiv, Lʹviv (all Ukrainian SSR), Tbilisi, Mtskheta (both Georgian SSR), Samarqand, Buxoro (both Uzbek SSR), Vilnius (Lithuanian SSR), Riga (Latvian SSR), and Tallinn (Estonian SSR). Historic sites in most of these cities were later included in the UNESCO World Heritage List or in the tentative lists submitted by the post-Soviet States Parties.

5. The source material does not indicate any dispute over different restoration methodologies in relation to this initiative. The plan for an Eastern European restoration centre never materialised, but it was brought forward repeatedly over the decades (see, e.g. Bericht über die Abstimmung [1975] 2017, 49).

6. See the draft amendments in UNESCO Archives, SHC/CONF.37 DR. 1972, E.2/355 E.

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Notes on contributors

Corinne Geering

Corinne Geering is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, Germany. She completed her PhD in Eastern European History at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Giessen. Her research specialises in the history of heritage and material culture, socio-political transformation and international cultural cooperation in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.