Modernist Retrotopia: City Authority, Architects, Local Historians, the Project of the Historical and Ethnographic Zone and the Destruction of Old Surgut (Late 1960s — 1990s)

Abstract

The article puts forward the concept of the modernist retrotopia, according to which public interest in the past and historical and cultural heritage in the USSR was determined through a discursive relationship with modernity and utopian ideas of progress, novelty and technology. In the framework of retrotopia, the authenticity of history was not a value in itself, but a flexible and constructed quality. The preservation of historical buildings or architecture did not mean strict restoration of objects of the past, but rather the use of innovative and modern methods — the exoticisation of prerevolutionary monuments, stylisation as “old”, “Russian” and “fabulous”, the organisation of specially designated reservations, the transfer of historic houses to a new location or even the “recreation” of historical structures. According to retrotopia, the historical had to become ideal and perfect, which often led to its replacement with the artificial and new. This concept implies that in the late USSR there was no strict opposition between historicism and modernism, and а fascination with the past and historical and cultural heritage became another variant of the modernist approach, which often worked blithely with historical objects: stylised, transferred, recreated or simply destroyed them. In this article, the author also introduces the concept of a retrotopia regime, which captures the formation of an unspoken coalition in Soviet cities between local historians, architects and city government leaders to solve problems related to historical and cultural heritage. A special role in such regimes was played by local historians, who built an ideal urban history and were often embedded in the party and Soviet nomenclature. The article will show the retrotopia mode using the example of the history of urban development in Surgut, when social activists and city leaders tried to negotiate the fate of historic buildings.