Socialism, Heritage and Internationalism after 1945. The Second World and Beyond.

ABSTRACT

The international histories of cultural heritage protection have been commonly focussed on the Eurocentric trajectories of heritage evolution in the twentieth century and trace the Western roots of cultural globalisation in the field of conservation and preservation of monuments. The current theme section offers the first examination of the contribution of socialist states, institutions and experts to the evolution of heritage concepts and policies in the postwar world. In what ways have socialist countries approached the conservation, handling and exhibition of cultural heritage differently to nonsocialist countries? How have tangible and intangible heritages been mobilised in support of socialist political agendas? What role did actors from socialist states play in the development of international heritage protection policies that proliferated in the wake of the Second World War? And to what extent did the Soviet Union and the wider Second World of the Cold War export and shape the development of socialist approaches to heritage in Third World? The collected articles in this themed section not only demonstrate the similarity of heritage policy formation in the so-called First and Second worlds but show the role that socialist states played in world geographies of cultural heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Socialism
• internationalism
• heritage protection
• history of heritage
• Third World

Introduction

The international histories of cultural heritage protection have been commonly focussed on the Eurocentric trajectories of heritage evolution in the twentieth century and trace the Western roots of cultural globalisation in the field of conservation and preservation of monuments (Walsh 1992; Swenson 2013; Harvey 2001). In recent years, scholarship has begun to acknowledge the importance of nonwestern perspectives on heritage and explored the role of actors from other world regions in shaping the global field of heritage protection (Winter 2015; Hall 2011; Gillman 2006; Betts and Ross 2015). Studies of diverse heritage regimes across the globe, however, often remain confined to national frameworks that accentuate the linkages between national identities and cultural patrimonies, which in turn serve as important instruments in constituting and reasserting visions of nations’ histories, memories and traditions (Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Lowerthal 1994; Thatcher 2018). While growing literature is concerned with the transnational circulation and cultural transfer of concepts, ideas and practices that underpin the entangled histories of heritage driven by transculturation (Smith 2006; Jokilehto 2014), the concept of ‘heritage’ has also been criticised as yet another form of western cultural imperialism. In this configuration ‘heritage’ discourse risks subjugating the cultural patrimony of non-European, postcolonial nations through the application of Western-centric frameworks (Falser 2015; Menon 2017; Bloembergen and Raben 2009). The current themed section offers the first examination of the contribution of socialist states, institutions and experts to the evolution of heritage concepts and policies in the post-war world, an area that remains largely overlooked in the existing literature. The articles not only demonstrate the similarity of heritage policy formation in the so-called First and Second worlds but show the role that socialist states played in world geographies of cultural heritage.

In what ways have socialist countries approached the conservation, handling and exhibition of cultural heritage differently to nonsocialist countries? How have tangible and intangible heritages been mobilised in support of socialist political agendas? What role did actors from socialist states play in the development of international heritage protections and policies that proliferated in the wake of the Second World War? And to what extent did the Soviet Union and the wider Second World of the Cold War export and shape the development of socialist approaches to heritage in Third World? How did ideas about heritage preservation originating in the socialist bloc coincide, clash, and were negotiated with approaches from the West and the Third World? These are some of the questions that have motivated the papers that constitute this themed section on socialism and heritage. The articles reproduced here originated in a conference held at the University of Exeter in November 2017, which focused on socialism, internationalism and heritage experts. That conference made clear that there is much research to be done in recognising the distinct contributions made by the socialist world to conception and international protection of cultural heritage. In this introduction we provide an overview of some of the defining features of what might be called ‘socialist heritage internationalism’, that is an approach to cultural heritage rooted in a socialist worldview that was actively engaged in fostering solidarity within and beyond national borders.

Heritage in the age of internationalism

The rapid development of heritage protection after the Second World War provided important instruments for the re-evaluation of the past in the new conditions that were featured by unprecedented global interdependence with multiple spheres of national life acquiring important international dimension, the symptoms of what Glenda Sluga called ‘an apogee of internationalism in the age of nationalism’ (2013). Alongside deepening economic integration, the establishment of various international organisations and the rise of international law-making, ‘cultural internationalism’ became an important manifestation of interconnectedness and cooperation between countries and people. It highlighted the exchange of ideas and persons that facilitated cross-cultural understanding and starkly contrasted the logic of geopolitical realism and underlying antagonism between two blocs in the conditions of the Cold War (Iriye 1997). Shared experience and legacy of Second World War devastations prompted the rise of new initiatives committed to preserving cultural heritage both in the capitalist West and in the socialist East. While the activities of ‘first heritage internationalists’ have been traced back to the nineteenth century (Swenson 2016) and the first attempts to articulate a common approach to the universal value of cultural heritage attributed to the interwar period,¹ it was after the Second World war, when protection of cultural heritage emerged as one of the important fields of international cooperation supported by institutions and legal documents (Forrest 2010; Duedahl 2016; Geering 2019b).

The internationalisation of heritage protection after World War II that overcame systemic divisions between the first and the second worlds has been discussed by some architectural conservation scholars (Glendinning 2013), but the input of socialist states to the transnational development of heritage agenda remains largely unexplored. Unlike the nations of the postcolonial world that has been often speciously presented as a passive and dependent in the historical accounts of post-war heritage debates, the Socialist Bloc has occupied the position of an antagonistic opponent of the developed West, a place where unlike in the free liberal world, cultural development was controlled by ideology and propaganda. In the context of Cold War, the Soviet Union represented a challenge to a set of political, cultural and social values associated with Western modernity and its drive for universalisation (Jervis 2010; Chari and Verdery 2009). Recent shifts in the historiographies of the Cold War have opened up new dimensions in the studies of ideological confrontation between the rivals, and in their relations to nations of the so-called ‘Third World’, so often considered, erroneously, as subordinate and powerless. Focus on a highly specific bipolar conflict that featured traditional paradigm of Cold War studies has been superseded by an increased attention to a complex fabric of disparate interactions, local, national, transnational and global, between multiple actors across the Iron Curtain, and within the global south (Romero 2014; Suri 2011; Westad 2007). The studies of socialist modernity as a distinct pattern of development underline the similarity between transformational agendas and processes in the West and in the socialist countries (Fitzpatrick 2000; Hoffman 2003; David-Fox 2006; Mark and Apor 2015). Tracing the involvement of the socialist states in the process of cultural globalisation and the impact of these international engagements on the socialist society back home allows not only to better comprehend the differences between two ideologies but also detect the points of their intersection (Mark, Kalinovsky, and Marung 2020; Stanek 2020). The importance attributed to history and tradition provides a vivid example of such overlapping concern both in capitalist and in socialist projects of modernity.

Re-assessing the meaning of cultural and historical heritage was at the core of modernisation as the paradigm of progressive change that demanded rationalisation of all vectors of temporality – the present, the future and, ultimately, the past (Betts and Ross 2015). It reflected the need for engineering new forms of historical consciousness that were a feature of the projects of modernity across East, West and Non-Aligned worlds even though it was driven by different motives. And it was often in the Third World where both the contradictions and convergences between two modes of development have been played out with utmost clarity (Gilman 2003; Engerman et al. 2003). The Soviet Union offered newly independent state pathways to industrial development, rooted in a socialist worldview, that was presented as an alternative to the supposed ‘neo-imperialism’ of the capitalist West (Engerman 2011; Mazov 2010). For countries emerging from the shackles of First World colonialism, the attraction of support and guidance from the socialist countries of the Second World cannot be understated. Alongside an interventionist state and top-down programme of modernisation driven by utopian visions of social egalitarianism, the socialist doctrine also facilitated a fundamental shift in perception of new narratives of national pasts. Emphasis fell on reclaiming a grand, teleological arc, within which colonialism would be a minor detour in a longer narrative of historical progress.

Socialist revolutionary ideology versus patrimony

In the socialist context, the specific meaning of patrimony, as a tangible and intangible inheritance from the past emerged at the intersection of several ideological dichotomies that structured cultural policies. The question of what to do with the heritage of past eras which now considered ‘imperial’ or ‘bourgeois’ was forefront. The class-based concept of society, at the core of socialist ideology, dictated a need to acknowledge that such heritage was a remnant of a now outdated system, over which socialism had triumphed. Though the October Revolution, which ushered in the Soviet socialist system, may be typically associated with acts of cultural destruction with regard to Imperial remnants has made clear that iconoclasm and preservation were inextricably bound to one another through major efforts to rethink the status of heritage in the wake of proletarian triumph (Shchenkov 2004). Indeed, the historic heritage of previous social elites presented urgent political questions; it need not be destroyed, but must be reframed within new ideological parameters that rather than glorify former greatness, could ring-fence it as a remnant of a regressive stage in a new progressive historical narrative (Baller 1984). The consequent exorcism and purification of pre-revolutionary monuments (Alonso González 2016) were followed by their purposeful re-signification, ensuring that they could perform a function in the new society (Kelly 2012). Socialist revolution – particularly, of course, the October Revolution but also the revolutions of Eastern Europe and the decolonising world – as a profoundly turbulent process through which the very status of certain heritages was upturned and reconstituted is a concern shared by several papers in this volume.

Emerging from the sense of profound historical break that revolution embodied, another imperative of the socialist concept of heritage derived from a new temporality, rooted in the communist ideology that was dominated by a specific future; the anticipation of communism was eschatologically projected onto the past and incorporated in the present. The complexities and contradictions of revolution as both a heritage-breaking and heritage-making process have been at the centre of the several studies in the themed section of the International Journal for Heritage Studies “Heritage, Revolution and the enduring Politics of the Past (Alonso González et al. 2019; Iacono 2019)”. If it was the October revolution that instigated the shift to new temporality; then, everything that preceded the revolution had to be re-evaluated in the light of the new ideological context. The value of cultural heritage within the socialist system, thus, emerged from the tension between two ‘patrimonial imaginaries’: an inherent negation of all pre-socialist achievements that was expressed in the revolutionary drive for destruction and the preservation of heritage as an important educational cultural resource required for the socialist enlightenment of the people who were granted a new status of the subject of history (Deschepper 2019). Attention paid to peoples’ traditions and patrimony in socialist states became a way to manifest the moral superiority and historical necessity of socialism. The concept of collective ownership of the past allowed socialist discourse of heritage to re-appropriate the cultural tradition in such a way that it now served to enhance the new framework of identity. The idea of heritage owned by people developed in the Soviet Union and countries of the socialist bloc was then exported to the decolonised world as a part and parcel of the national liberation and decolonisation programme promoted across the socialist countries. In this way, the teleological modus operandi of the socialist societal and cultural project not only allowed but even dictated the ‘heritagization’ of both revolutionary monuments and other cultural products of the socialist time as well as pre-revolutionary heritage as having an important historical value in the socialist cultural universe (Grama 2019). All these specific features of the socialist concept of heritage were crystallised during the inter-war period in the USSR and they formed the ground for the internationalisation of socialist heritage in the second half of the twentieth century.

The collected articles in this themed section develop several topics that are crucial for understanding the complex relationship between socialism and post-war internationalism in the protection of cultural heritage: the contribution of the Soviet policymakers in the discursive formation of the concept of the heritage of humanity in post-World War II (Geering 2019a); export of socialist ideas of cultural heritage to both decolonising countries (Telepneva 2019) and other Non-Aligned states (Cowcher 2019b); interpolation of national and international structures and actors in heritage practise and policies (Bekus 2019a).

Drawing on the analysis of the Soviet approaches to the concept of a heritage of humanity, Corinne Geering demonstrates that internationalisation of heritage protection after the end of the Second World war was also linked to nascent political agenda of the time and reflected major concerns of states and their foreign policies. The devastation suffered by USSR and other Eastern European countries fostered the perception of cultural heritage as inherently linked to the international security and state sovereignty. Heritage protection discourse, in this context, formed an important field of the cultural diplomacy deployed by the Soviet officials in their numerous ‘struggle for peace’ initiatives. As Geering’s analysis shows, the opposition between the capitalist West and the socialist East that featured the political context of the Cold War facilitated the rise of awareness of the universal value of the heritage that required international protection and, paradoxically, created demand for cultural engagement and cooperation between the rivals.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as anti-colonial movements began to gather pace across the African continent, for example, distinct efforts were put in place to support decolonisation efforts through an emphasis on reclaiming historical heritage damaged or denigrated by European colonialism. In encouraging Nikita Khruschev to establish African Studies as a field in the USSR, African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois emphasised that the greatest contribution to the ‘socialist development’ of emergent nations was to recover and disseminate knowledge about the continent, particularly it's rich historical past. Soviet engagements with the African continent on the question of heritage are addressed in articles by Natasha Telepneva and Kate Cowcher. Telepneva’s study of Soviet-Somali Historical Expedition (Telepneva 2019) provides a detailed account of how the Soviet interdisciplinary ‘complex approach’ to studying African history as a progressive project was put into action through efforts to (re)write Somali history, specifically to excavate its pre- and anti-colonial past. Although originating in proposals in the 1960s to counter the dominance of UNESCO and Britain in shaping Somalia’s historical narrative (to be made manifest in monuments and cultural institutions), the Soviet expedition, led by Sergei Smirnov, gained specific momentum in the wake of Somalia’s revolution in 1969, which brought Siad Barre, and his proclaimed affiliation to ‘scientific socialism’, to power. Through a process of ‘decolonising’ Somalia’s history and, in particular, resurrecting the anti-colonial leader Sayyid Hassan, who had declared jihad against the British in 1899, as a national hero, the Soviet expedition served Barre’s agenda to forge a modern, national identity for Somalia that emphasised its resistance to colonial rule. As Telepneva shows, much of the proposed program of Soviet-Somali cooperation with regard to cultural heritage remained unfulfilled, specifically following the break-in diplomatic relations during the 1977 Ogaden conflict with socialist Ethiopia, where the Soviets opted to support the latter.

Cowcher’s study offers a concurrent history of cultural heritage debates in Ethiopia, a country with an ancient royal lineage that had not experienced European colonialism but did enact its own socialist revolution, with clear echoes of the Bolsheviks, in 1974. Her examination of the proposals for the new National Museum, to be reconfigured in line with a new ‘progressive’ national history, reveals, however, that UNESCO remained a major partner even after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and the establishment of the Marxist military regime. Though as Telepneva’s study illustrates, there were significant tensions between UNESCO and the Soviet Union with regard to African nations, the case of Ethiopia reveals that both remained involved in a country that for the former embodied historic Africa, rich in ‘World Heritage’, and for the latter represented the last hope for communism on the continent. The result was a UNESCO report that laid bare the tensions and the overlaps between internationalist agenda of the latter, and the ‘progressive’ aspirations of Ethiopia’s military regime, increasingly informed by attitudes to heritage preservation imported from Moscow.

Both Telepneva and Cowcher’s studies provide concrete evidence of the ways in which the Soviet Union was actively engaged with assisting African nations in the reconfiguration and presentation of historic heritage in narratives that emphasised anti-colonial struggles, and, in the case of Ethiopia, the containment of ‘risky’ imperial heritage. These studies, however, also remind us that, though certainly part of a wider cultural diplomacy agenda that sought to assert influence in the political direction of post-revolutionary nations, there were important actors in Ethiopia and Somalia that negotiated for that which they deemed most useful. That ideas from both Soviet and UNESCO conceptions of heritage texts and French UNESCO consultants were utilised in Addis in pursuit of rethinking the National Museum, offers a counterpoint to the concept of the Soviet Union as culturally imperialist, simply imposing its policies without any local selective interpretations.

African stories reveal how socialist engagement in heritage protection facilitated the rise of the ‘socialist solidarity’ that was manifested in advocating more active international engagement. They reveal the diversity of the socialist conditions for heritage development that emerged out of the local cultural and historical specifics and the connections with other socialist and nonsocialist countries. The Soviet contribution to the formation of international heritage policies and the Soviet efforts to assist emancipatory breakthrough of newly sovereign postcolonial nations and to promote the socialist model of development cultures was often hybrid amalgamations of national and international heritage practices and ideas. As recent studies of the ‘global Cold War’ demonstrate, the Soviet cultural engagement with African and Asian countries played important role in shaping the cultural taxonomies within the Soviet Union itself as they brought Soviet peripheral nations to the forefront of Soviet policies towards the ‘foreign east’ (Kirasirova 2011). Participation of Central Asian and Caucasian elites was supposed to lend the Soviet model additional credibility and persuasiveness by using winning hearts and minds in the Third World (Hilger 2017, 325). Educational and cultural exchange, various meetings and conferences that were organised together with the Afro-Asian countries were meant to promote the experiences of the nations in the ‘Soviet South’, which on their way of becoming socialist modern faced similar challenges and dilemmas (Djagalov 2020).² This, in turn, elevated Central Asian and Caucasian nations’ status within the Soviet system and provided Central Asian elites with an important leverage to lobby new cultural and economic policies in their home republics (Kalinovsky 2018).

The role-played by cultural practitioners from various Soviet republics in shaping the Soviet heritage policies after 1945 is at the centre of analysis in the article by Nelly Bekus. Behind the façade of the monolith Soviet cultural politics, Bekus reveals complex mechanisms of interaction between different actors – local heritage experts, Soviet state officials and one of the key UNESCO led the international organisation in heritage protection, ICOMOS. The study uncovers many lines of parallelism in changing attitude towards cultural tradition triggered by rapid change in the context of western and Soviet modernisation which created a common ground for widening the scope of heritage entanglements across the Iron Curtain. Exploring the history of the Soviet involvement in the activities of ICOMOS from the moment of its establishment in 1965, Bekus’ study reveals the unprecedented impact that international expert organisation exerted on the development of Soviet heritage protection policy and contribution of the Soviet professionals to the global development of heritage concepts and ideas. Heritage practitioners from various Soviet republics emerge in this story as key players who operated at the intersection of locally grounded heritage conservation initiatives and international expert communities and organisation. This methodological shift in studying the evolution of the Soviet heritage policy reveals the intricate process of cultural transmission and influences in which various regions of the Soviet space had often been major producers of heritage discourses who shaped the Soviet heritage policy rather than being shaped by it.

Alongside the story of socialist internationalism, commonly understood as an engagement between national entities or states, the focus on experts as a major agency in Bekus’ study allows to uncovers transnational circulation of heritage concepts and ideas and to illuminate the ways, in which these ideas interlock forming the ground for dialogue and cooperation between various expert communities both within the Soviet Union and beyond. Furthermore, for diverse Soviet nations, this heritage internationalism reinforced their sense of shared cultural morphology within the wider civilisational contexts across Soviet borders, promoting their belonging to multiple transnational spaces – from European for the Baltic States and Belarus to Mongol or Turkic for Central Asian nations (Bekus 2017). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these alternate frames of cultural identification fostered through the heritage protection practices acquired new legitimacy and became a foundation for heritage policies of post-Soviet nation-states and, ultimately, for the nations’ ideas of civilisational belonging (Bekus 2019b, 1619). Noteworthy, this intra-Soviet dynamics in heritage policymaking reiterated the emerging regionalisation of the ideas about the heritage that could be observed globally. Since the 1970s, the concept of the European heritage became promoted alongside the Islamic and multiple other frameworks for cultural patrimonies (Falser and Lipp 2015; Mark et al. 2019), echoing in the turn to nationalist Han civilisation heritage in China from the 1980s.³

While globalisation theorists tend to depict capitalist markets as the main driving force of cultural exchange (Crane 2002), the story of the socialist engagement with the nations of the Third World demonstrates the role-played by other incentives in the history of cultural globalisation. Heritage internationalism reiterated specific mode of connectivity generated by socialist discourses on solidarity which was in many ways distinct from, but also overlapping with other types of global ‘cultural circulation and exchange’ such as the human rights activism or the global marketplace (Han 2018). Heritage became one of the important resources for building new forms of collective subjectivity, which was cutting cross political and geographical border. And this process was managed not only by Communist party ideologists but also cultural activists and heritage scholars and practitioners who carried out what David Featherston called a ‘labour of connection’ of socialist heritage internationalism (2012). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, the socialist heritage emerged as a new area of a commercial enterprise with the Chinese-red tourism and European communist heritage becoming an important destination of the domestic and international tourist markets (Caraba 2011).

The studies brought together in this issue are far from a comprehensive overview of the socialist heritage internationalism as some key players of the socialist world, such as China, Cuba, and other nonaligned nations remained beyond the scope of this collection. Some important stories of cultural engagement that occurred on the heritage ground between the first, the second and the third worlds are yet to be told by heritage historians. This collection of articles, we hope, provides a starting point for further exploration of the topic.

Disclosure statement

No, potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [[RL-2012-053] ‘1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fal].

Notes on contributors

Nelly Bekus

Nelly Bekus is Associate Lecturer at the University of Exeter. Previously held research posts at Harvard University, the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, and the University of Warsaw. Published monographs Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative Belarusianness (CEU Press 2010), co-authored Orthodoxy Versus Post-Communism? Belarus, Serbia, Ukraine and the Russkiy Mir (Cambridge Scholars, 2016). Her publications also include over twenty articles and book chapters on social memory, urban heritage, nationalism, religious and linguistic identity. Her works published in the British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, and Urbanities.

Kate Cowcher

Kate Cowcher is Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She is a historian of art from Africa with a specific interest in Ethiopia, and in modern and contemporary practices. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA from the University of Edinburgh. Her current book project examines art, film and politics during Ethiopia’s socialist revolution. Her broader research interests include art and cultural exchange in Africa during the Cold War, intersections of revolution, socialism and heritage on the continent, and histories of African modernist art. Her writing has been published in African Arts, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Art History and Art Bulletin.

Notes

1. See, for example, parallel development in Europe and America: The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments was adopted at First International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments in Greece in 1931, and America, where the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments signed by member states of Pan American Union in 1935 (Elliott and Schmutz 2012).

2. For examples, the Conferences of Afro-Asian Writers took place in the Soviet Union twice, in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 1958 and in Almaty (Kazakhstan) in 1978 (Djagalov 2020).

3. Fei Xiatong ‘Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese People,’ The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, November 15 and 17, 1988. The original English version is available at: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/fei90.pdfThis work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [RL-2012-053] ‘1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective’.