Resumen de Renaming the industrial heritage in post-revolutionary Petrograd: Innovative use of an old tradition
In this chapter, I reflect on renaming urban spaces and their architectural objects, widely used by the young Soviet state after the 1917 Revolution. On one side, renaming was an old tradition used worldwide to commemorate the appropriation of new lands. On the other, the Bolsheviks applied an innovative approach to using this tradition to introduce the defeated past heritage as an achievement of their present. I focus specifically on St. Petersburg’s destiny, the Russian Empire’s former capital, which name had been changed several times throughout the twentieth century. St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great, in 1703, as a “window to the West,” taking the course to the Europeanization of Russia. From the start, St. Petersburg claimed its hospitality to international entrepreneurs who, since the city’s early years, had been settling on the banks of the Neva River, building factories and plants, boosting the technological development of the Russian Empire. After the Bolshevik Revolution, all private industries in Russia were nationalized, and previous owners were deprived of their rights to ownership. The state re-named each inherited industrial object to erase any records of their origins and history to re-introduce them as the new regime products.
