The Past in Common: Modern Ruins as a Shared Urban Experience of Revolution-Era Moscow and Petersburg

Abstract

In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.