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Simon Weppel is a PhD student at Cambridge University and a Cambridge Trust Fellow at the Cambridge Heritage Research Center. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Free University of Berlin, a master's degree from Cambridge University and research at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and the SciencesPos in Paris. His doctoral dissertation examines the development of heritage preservation during the late Soviet period.
The lecture series is part of the project "Translated Memory: Eastern Europe's Past in the Global Arena" (grant holder Eneken Laanes, grant agreement 853385, 2020-2024), funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Introduction to the lecture

In this paper, I will demonstrate what I argue is the development of a ‘heritage temporality’ in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. On the basis of a discourse analysis of visitor guidebooks, tourist brochures, and newspaper articles relating to three Lenin museums, I trace a shift in how past, present, and future are discussed in late Soviet society.
Until the mid-1960s, these highly ideologically charged sites emphasise their educational and agitational purpose, describing themselves as ‘sources of inspiration’ for the builders of communism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, a gradual change takes place: guidebooks invoke the future ever more rarely, instead inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the historic surroundings of days gone by. Increasingly, the museums favour the restoration and preservation of an idealised past over the continuation of their erstwhile future-oriented discourses.

My paper will theorise this phenomenon and place it into the wider cultural and historical context of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s dichotomy of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ in order to investigate the preconditions for the rise of heritage as a cultural phenomenon – both in the Soviet Union and globally.

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