Publicomos

Réf.

42855

Type

conference item

Titre

Democracy: Washing the Socialist Stains from our Heritage

Langues

English

Auteurs

Reinvald, Jaanika

Lieu de publication

Charenton-le-Pont

Pays de publication

France

Maison d'édition

ICOMOS

Date

2018

Titre de conférence

ICOMOS 19th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium "Heritage and Democracy"

Lieu de conférence

New Delhi, India

Date de conférence

13-14th December 2017

Mots-clés

identity / reconciliation / cultural heritage / dissonant heritage / Soviet heritage / built heritage / management / causes of deterioration / legislation / public awareness / conflicts / destruction of cultural heritage

Pays mentionnés

Estonia / Latvia / Lithuania

Résumé en anglais

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of the democratic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the countries have consciously and subconsciously been eradicating the built reminders of their Soviet history. This has occasionally led to the mindless destruction of functional monumental edifices associated with Soviet legacy and resulted in the worship of everything new and innovative, such as glass and steel shopping malls and high rise office blocks symbolic of theconsumerist nature of modern western democracies. The making of the cultural heritage for these newly independent countries is tightly tied to the largely failing integration policies in whereby young second generation Russians, even after 26 years of independence, still don’t identify themselves as citizens of the Republics and resulting problems andconflicts are common. In this paper we examine the correlation between democracies’ want and need to exemplify themselves as a beacon of free thought, speech and will with the requirement of heritage institutions operating within these democracies to preserve not just those sites deemed worthy according to current social thinking butalso their moral duty to preserve sites created by all socio-economic models. We will compare and contrast the on-going discourse about achieving perceived democratic idealswithin these countries through the production of new heritage with relevant data, information and case
studies from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Document joint

22._ICOA_945_Reinvald_SM.pdf

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)