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Saving Stalin's Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders' determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city's wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in any language of the most consequential work of art ever to be executed in Russia-the equestrian monument to Peter the Great, orThe Bronze Horseman,as it has come to be known since it appeared in Alexander Pushkin's poem bearing that title. The author deals with the cultural setting that prepared the ground for the monument and provides life stories of those who were involved in its creation: the sculptors Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Marie-Anne Collot, the engineer Marin Carburi, the diplomat Dmitry Golitsyn, and Catherine's \"commissar\" for culture, Ivan Betskoi. He also touches upon the extraordinary resonance of the monument in Russian culture, which, since the unveiling in 1782, has become the icon of St. Petersburg and has alimented the so-called \"St. Petersburg theme\" in Russian letters, familiar from the works of such writers as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Bely.

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.

The chemical and mineral composition and formation conditions of dense grey-yellow colour crusts on the surface of monuments and bowls of decorative fountains in Peterhof (Russia) were studied using a wide range of methods (XRD, SEM, EMPA, Raman spectroscopy). The crusts consisted of calcium carbonates (monohydrocalcite, aragonite, calcite), magnesium carbonates (lansfordite, nesquehonite), and Sr-, Pb-rich carbonates (aragonite–cerussite–strontianite solid solution; up to 29 wt% PbO and 43 wt% SrO). Carbonates formed on all types of materials (gold, polyester resin, marble, granite) and do not interact with it. The cause of the formation of carbonate crusts on decorative fountains is the high content of carbonate ions in water. The variety of mineral phases is associated with fluctuations in the pH and Mg/Ca ratio. Recommendations are given on conservation measures that inhibit the formation of carbonate layers that threaten the preservation of the cultural heritage of this UNESCO World Heritage Site.