In Search of the Soviet Past: the Lipetsk Case

Ivanov Andrei Gennadievich Doctor of Philosophy Leading Researcher, Faculty of Philosophy, Saratov State University, Professor, the department of State, Municipal Service and Management, Lipetsk branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration 410028, Russia, Saratov region, Saratov, Volskaya str., 10 A, building 12 agivanov2@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The research was carried out at the expense of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 22-18-00153 "The image of the USSR in historical memory: a study of media strategies for reproducing ideas about the past in Russia and foreign countries."

The time of the settlement on the site of modern Lipetsk is controversial, and the discussion continues to this day. Under the years 1283 and 1284, the chronicles for the first time mention the "Lipovichi Prince" – the prince of the city, identified by some local historians and researchers with modern Lipetsk. Historical science does not confirm this. Comprehensively analyzing the chronicle information, scientists came to the conclusion that the evidence given in them refers to a different territory, west of Kursk ^{[1, p. 26]}.

The myth of the founding of Lipetsk includes a completely different narrative associated with the development of the southern borders of Russia and the development of metallurgy. After the capture of the Azov fortress at the end of the XVII century, the border of Russia moved far to the south. The Lipetsk Region ceased to be a border. It is with the time of Peter the Great that the appearance on the map of Russia of the point that later became the city of Lipetsk is connected: 1703, when, by decree of Peter I, at the confluence of Lipovka with the Voronezh River near the iron ore deposits, the construction of ironworks and a work settlement began.

But if in 1926 the population of Lipetsk was 21.4 thousand people, then in 1954, when the Lipetsk region was formed, it was 127.5 thousand people, and at the end of the existence of the Soviet Union – 490.3 thousand people (1990) ^[1]. That is, there was a 23-fold increase (!) in the population for 65 years. The main factors of such a sharp increase in the city's population were at least two factors: the development of the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine (built in the 1930s) and the creation of the Lipetsk Region (on January 6, 1954, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR was issued, which marked the beginning of the Lipetsk region and, accordingly, the city of Lipetsk as a regional center).

Next, we will make an attempt to study public and local history, to look at Lipetsk through the eyes of a layman, through the eyes of an unprofessional historian.

The fact is that in recent years, such a direction of research as public history has become increasingly widespread: "The authors of projects in the field of public history always face a difficult task – to make the past closer and clearer to a modern person, without depriving this past of complexity and without denying it otherness. The fulfillment of this task is hampered by various factors: the commercialization of culture, historical politics, the spread of social networks, the multiplication of "producers-consumers" (prosumers), etc." ^{[2, p. 10]}. And further: "... history becomes vital when historians introduce their listeners to the issues from which their own historical research has grown, when they involve the audience in the act of writing (doing) history" ^{[2, p. 397]}.

And, despite the fact that public history is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has already become a field open to testing ambitious ideas and theoretical constructs, and in general the analytical framework of many memory researchers is applicable to it.

Theoretical frameworkA. Etkind's model seems productive to us, in which a distinction is proposed between types of memory with an emphasis on the so–called "memory events" and a separate type – "phantom (ghostly) memory" - in the case of Russian reality.

So, A. Etkind uses the terms "hard memory" and "soft memory": "Like a computer, culture has two forms of memory, which can be compared with hard, or hardware, and soft, or software. Soft memory mainly includes texts — historical, artistic and other narratives, while hard memory is primarily monuments. <...> ...both forms of memory are interdependent. Monumental means of cultural memory cannot work without interaction with discursive "software". On the other hand, software tools — public opinion, historical discussions, literary images — would die with the change of each generation or even with the change of fashion and moods, if they were not fixed in monuments, memorials and museums" ^{[3, p. 228]}. "Memory places" constitute the content of "hard", and "memory events" constitute the "soft" options of cultural memory. For the normal functioning of culture, the harmonious functioning of both is necessary. The author then clarifies these general remarks in relation to Russia. For her, he identifies a third type of memory, which is not reducible to the first two and is associated with incomplete overcoming of the past — "death memory", embodied in various simulacra (ghosts and spirits, vampires and phantoms). The final structure of cultural memory, according to A. Etkind, looks like this: soft, hard and phantom (ghost) memory (software, hardware, ghostware) ^[4]. Although A. Etkind's model is promising, questions arise concerning incomplete overcoming of the past, when a phantom (ghostly) memory is distinguished: is it necessary to completely overcome the past, especially when it seems so attractive?

The intuitions of J. Assman ^[5], who identified the communicative and cultural areas of memory, will also be used.

In addition, we will use the so-called analytical optics of "multi-scale" proposed by E. Rigni and C. de Cesare: "The concept of multi-scale is based on the recognition that memory is produced and circulates within social frameworks of different scales: individual, family, city, region, nation, continent, world, etc. It is extremely important that the framework is not arranged in a hierarchical order. Each of them, from individuals and communities to which these individuals belong, to larger-scale configurations, is equally important for the production of memory and the observation of its changes" ^{[6, p. 12]}. Diversity recognizes the existence in the modern world of many memory frameworks that overlap each other: intimate, local, regional, global. The optics of "multi-scale" correlates with our own conclusions, which we came to when investigating the everyday mythology of family memory, when it was concluded that "..."work on the myth"permeates all levels of an individual's being, from individual to societal. The everyday mythology of family memory appears as a kind of mediator between the individual and society, offering unique stable family mytholandscapes" ^{[7, p. 66]}.

Another important point that we would like to emphasize in the context of working with local memory, with the memory of places, is the affective, emotional aspect associated with the search for identity. In particular, having considered numerous concepts of space in the social sciences, the St. Petersburg researchers came to the following conclusion: "Almost all approaches to the analysis of the space of places focus on the affective component of social practices of interaction between people and places. Even special concepts have been developed that reflect this aspect of the scientific strategy: “topophilia”, “sense of place”, “topoanalysis”, “places of affect". When studying the social reproduction of various aspects of the space of places, special importance in the social sciences began to attach to the process of imagination, the work of memory and identity" ^{[8, p. 102]}. It should be noted here that the emotional component and the relationship with identity make local memory, in turn, closely related to constructive myths. D. Armstrong also called such myths "constitutive", calling for the fact that the appropriate policy should be built around them: "constitutive myths" (mythomotors) are complex mythical structures that allow determining the identity of a group in relation to public education ^[9]. Let us add that the connection with myth as a marker of identity, in our opinion, is mainly anthropological in nature.

Lipetsk case: what was and what becameThe interweaving, on the one hand, of hard, soft and phantom memory, on the other hand, of memories of different scales can be imagined by making a kind of journey through time and space.

Let's try to cross by trolleybus (interestingly, trolleybus traffic in the city was completely destroyed in 2017) The Soviet district of the city of Lipetsk in the direction of the city center, for example, in 1982. In this case, we will pass by the cinema "Vinnytsia" (Vinnytsia was a sister city of Lipetsk until the mid-2010s; however, even young people who have been living near this place for a long time do not know that such a cinema previously existed). Next we will find ourselves in an area with "cosmic" names of streets and infrastructure facilities (originated in the 1960s; many names have been preserved: first of all, streets (Cosmonauts, Tereshkova, Gagarin, Tsiolokovsky, Titov, etc.), the hockey sports palace "Zvezdny", some disappeared (cinemas "Cosmos", "Sputnik", cafe "Orbit", restaurant "Voskhod")). We will follow the street of Cosmonauts, along which there is a row of five-storey houses, the ends of which are decorated with drawings on space themes, indicating the corresponding years when the exploits of space conquest were performed (today high-rise buildings are attached to the walls of such houses, completely covering the drawings, and a search on Internet resources for photos of these houses with space drawings does not give results; it remains to resurrect vivid images of the Soviet past in one's own memory). Then the stop "Starting Engine Plant" appears, the name of which has been changed to "Bykhanov Garden" (since there is no longer a factory, but there is a shopping center in its place; the description of the situation for the Bykhanov Garden object will be further). We pass the Heroes' Square with the Eternal Flame adjacent to Komsomolsk Park, where Victory Day celebrations are no longer held (the celebrations have moved to Victory Square) and finally reach Lenin Square with an unusual name – Lenin Square-Cathedral Square – where mass events are also no longer held, such as, for example, City Day (celebrations the days of the city were moved from this square to Peter the Great Square (previously called Karl Marx Square), the dates of the holiday also changed: from the second half of May to the second half of July, on the day of metallurgists)).

It turns out that an imaginary trip activates all the types of memory allocated by A. Etkind, but, first of all, it is a phantom memory: cosmic drawings on the ends of houses live only in personal memories, the places of former festivities are empty today and merge with the urban landscape. The optics of "multi-scale" is also applicable to Lipetsk: in the context of a broad framework of memory, the memory of the exploits of Soviet cosmonauts was perpetuated, and "space" quarters were built in the city, reminiscent of space exploration in the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet positive images and myths associated with the conquest of space affected the appearance of Lipetsk at the time.

Currently, the names of streets, squares, parks in the center of today's Lipetsk are a kind of conglomerate from different periods of history. Pre-revolutionary Russia is mainly represented by terrorists and revolutionaries (Zhelyabova Street, the monument to the People's Volunteers in the Lower Park). The dominance of the Soviet past has an unusual configuration – from excesses such as Lenin Square-the National Team and the street named after the Latvian shooter A.V. Zegel in the very center of the city to the "traditional" streets of International, Soviet, Oktyabrskaya. There are also inclusions associated with the myth of the foundation, with the Peter the Great era: Petrovsky Descent, Petrovsky Bridge, Petrovsky Market, Peter the Great Square ("symbolic new model", as it was called Karl Marx Square until the end of the 1990s).

Of course, one should agree with A. Assman, who argued that "urban space should preserve heterogeneous layers of time so that historical consciousness absorbs both continuity and turning points" ^{[10, p. 72]}, but when today's leaders of the city and the region carry out such a total reformatting of urban space, the city becomes increasingly more eclectic.

For example, on August 8, 2014, a monument to the heroes of the First World War was inaugurated in Lipetsk. The 17.5-meter-high stele appeared at the intersection of Tereshkova and Tsiolkovsky Streets. The historical coat of arms of Russia is fixed on the top, St. George crosses are in the middle. The opening of the stele in Lipetsk was a key event in a series of events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of 1914-1918 ^[11]. And on May 7, 2021, a monument to Nicholas the Wonderworker was erected at the entrance to Lipetsk from Yelets, the first among the sculptures of Orthodox saints planned to be installed at four entrances to the city. The city administration said that a group of patrons approached the authorities with the initiative to install a monument to Nicholas the Wonderworker, that the issue was worked out jointly with the diocese, and the appearance of the monument was coordinated by the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture ^[12].

However, the initiatives of local authorities to fill the urban space with monuments that are not directly related to the history of the city seem unpromising, and therefore there are doubts about the validity of the directions of their "ascetic" activities, manifested in the planting of "hard memory".

In addition, "soft memory" is also represented in the building of urban identity. So, on January 2, 2021, the head of the city of Lipetsk, E. Y. Uvarkina, on Peter the Great Square, launched the "Petrovsky quest", a game in the format of a historical detective, where tasks are based on real facts related to the reign of Peter the Great: "We are starting the historical quest "Petrovsky Secrets of the Lipetsk Land". All this is done for us, Lipchans. In order that, having passed all the tests full of secrets and riddles, we could learn more about the history of our native land" ^[13]. Further – in 2022 – the events continued in the format of the so-called "Peter's amusements". Such actions and events, of course, affect the image of the city: attempts to benefit from the times of Peter the Great to the detriment, for example, of the Soviet past lead ordinary people to a sense of artificiality and contrivance of commercial enterprises.

Memory constructors and Identity markersIn this regard, it is worth paying attention to the role of public authorities in the construction of regional and local symbolic policy.

It seems that the leaders do not bother to figure out what symbolic meaning certain places of urban space have.

On November 7, 2017, an article was published in the British edition of The Guardian, which tells about the Identity Institute company, which advises the leadership of cities and regions in the field of developing a strategy for branding places, creating slogans. It is significant that the founders of this company reported that they constantly face attempts by cities, regions and countries to get rid of their Soviet past, but also with uncertainty about how to position the respective territories in the future. Calling the Lipetsk region a "patchwork quilt" glued together from five other regions, the journalists of the British newspaper quote the words of the head of the regional Department of Culture and Tourism that there is still no way that you can talk to someone and note - "This is a Lipetsk person" ^[14].

According to the Institute of Identity, the "young" Lipetsk region turns out to be a successful testing ground for experimenting with brands, but is this a justification for interrupting continuity in pursuit of a bright new brand? As a result, attempts to solve the problem of regional identity resulted in an absolutely faceless formulation – in the regional tourist brand "Lipetsk Land".

Despite the fact that the focus of the British article was the Lipetsk region, the problems with the search for identity also concern, in fact, the city of Lipetsk. But Lipetsk has acquired its own key markers of Lipetsk's identity for a long time: a metallurgical plant, mineral water and an aviation center. Their formation falls at the beginning of the century, respectively, XVIII, XIX and XX. The origin of metallurgy dates back to the beginning of the XVIII century. The Northern War required a large number of guns, shells and ammunition. And so in 1700, after Peter I visited the territory of modern Lipetsk, it was decided to create metallurgical and cannon factories on the palace lands of the Romanesque County. It was at the end of the XVII – beginning of the XVIII centuries that the construction of the first large metallurgical enterprises of that time began on the territory of the modern city of Lipetsk. Natural and geographical conditions contributed to their creation and development ^{[1, p. 54]}. Today Lipetsk is a large industrial center, which is the core of the largest Russian agglomeration with specialization in the field of full-cycle ferrous metallurgy. Fame for mineral water comes at the beginning of the XIX century. In 1805, Alexander I issued a decree on the opening of the Lipetsk Mineral Waters resort. The resort facilities were built on the site of the Upper and Lower Lipsky factories. Lipetsk is becoming a resort town. Today Lipetsk mineral water is a recognizable brand, the labels invariably contain images of either an obelisk or a monument to Peter, or the building of the Lipetsk pump room. The formation and development of aviation is associated with the beginning of the XX century. Under an agreement with the Directorate of the Air Force of the Russian Empire for the supply of Moran-type training airplanes, the Lipetsk Airplane Workshops Partnership was formed in Lipetsk in 1916. Although the workshops were closed in 1918, having produced and delivered to Moscow only five standard Moran G airplanes of French design, in the future the connection of Lipetsk with aviation only intensified. Especially noteworthy are the activities of the secret German school of military pilots in the 1920s and 1930s (object "L"). Today, the aviation aerobatics group of the Russian Air Force "Falcons of Russia", created in 2006 on the basis of the Lipetsk Aviation Center, has become widely known.

It is known that I. Assman believed that it takes about 80-100 years to transfer images of the past from communicative memory to cultural memory ^[5]. The highlighted markers of Lipetsk's identity, of course, relate to cultural memory, and largely depend on the actions of actors and institutions of memory policy. However, the Soviet past still remains in the communicative memory, although it approaches the invisible border of the transition to cultural memory.

Treatment of the Soviet past in LipetskBut, in our opinion, many residents of modern Lipetsk do not have a sense of continuity with the past, whether it is the events of Peter's time, or even the beginning of the XX century.

Perhaps it is the Soviet past of the post-war period that is the only memory space around which the identity of the Lipchans could be built, the memory of the local community could be formed. All the more amazing are the events taking place literally before our eyes.

In this sense, the example of the Lipetsk park "Bykhanov Garden" radically reconstructed in 2019 at the expense of Sberbank of the Russian Federation is indicative. As a result, the Soviet past almost completely disappeared from the narrative about the history of the park, and only the founding fathers, the Bykhanov brothers from the XIX century and the financial sponsor from the XXI century remained. There are no mentions of the facts that the park was called "Komsomolsky", and later – the park named after V. N. Skorokhodov (a Soviet teacher and fighter for the construction of socialism), at all on numerous signs and signs after reconstruction. In the case of the Lipetsk Bykhanov Garden, "... it turns out to be much easier to construct a new mythology, starting from facelessness and standardization, than being "on the shoulders" of the imperial and Soviet past, which could act as a signifier (in the Bartowski sense), filled with meaning, memory and history. It is enough to look at the new look of the park, which has become almost indistinguishable from any modern art project, to understand how much the imperial and Soviet atmosphere has been lost" ^{[15, p. 123]}. It is also significant that the opening of the park after reconstruction chronologically coincided with the regional elections. While still in the process of getting rid of the Soviet historical and cultural heritage, in the fight against the Soviet past, disparate memorial practices remain an effective tool in the hands of local political elites.

Of course, ambiguous actions are carried out with the Soviet past in the modes of both "hard" and "soft" memory. The exception should have been the memory of the Great Patriotic War as the most state-controlled memorial practice. In particular, some researchers note the following: "Narratives are the most "fluid" form of existence of the past that cannot be controlled in the modern information society. Even the state, which controls the content of school textbooks in Russia and influences the type of museum expositions and the choice of movie plots, is unable to suppress alternative versions of the past developing in different formats, and is forced to focus on controlling one (albeit the most important) period – the Second World War" ^{[16, p. 227]}. But even in the case of the memory of the Great Patriotic War, changes have taken place. First of all, we are talking about the transfer of the same events in Lipetsk on May 9 from Heroes Square to Victory Square. Probably, there were reasons for the corresponding change of place (for example, a more convenient place for the formation and further march of the Immortal Regiment), but let's focus only on one fact: The Eternal Flame burns on Heroes' Square. The fact is that "... in Soviet cultural practice, "eternal flame" marks the burial places of the deceased – those who died prematurely" ^{[17, p. 231]}; and further: "The cult object created in modern times has become a social institution in a very short period, in a conveyor way transforming individual worlds of citizens into one common reality" ^{[17, pp. 234-235]}. Today, the attention of the Russian authorities to the phenomenon of Eternal Flame is emphasized by the recent instruction (beginning of February 2022) of the President of the Russian Federation to Gazprom to organize the supply of natural gas for Eternal Flames free of charge ^[18].

However, as a result of the initiatives and actions of the municipal authorities, the place next to the Eternal Flame (Heroes' Square), as well as the space adjacent to this place (Bykhanov Garden (formerly called V. N. Skorokhodov Park)), have recently been deprived of mass events in part of Victory Day and, accordingly, have become less identified with 9 May.

Of course, transfers have occurred before. Here we can recall the above-mentioned example of celebrating the city Day, but also note the new practices of holding event events in completely new, unrelated to any historical moments, spaces (for example, music festivals in Lipetsk on the Green Island on the Voronezh River). But the change of the traditional place of Victory Day celebration by Lipchans to a location near the Central Market is perceived as not fully thought out. And if the memory of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War is certainly supported in the city, although such support is becoming inconsistent, then with regard to other memorial practices of objects of the Soviet past, it remains only to choose which techniques and forms of oblivion we have to talk about. For example, A. Assman identifies techniques and forms of oblivion. Techniques of oblivion according to A. Assman: (1) erasure; (2) cover-up; (3) concealment; (4) silence; (5) rewriting; (6) ignoring; (7) neutralization; (8) denial; (9) loss ^{[10, pp. 19-24]}. Forms of oblivion: (1) automatic; (2) saving; (3) selective; (4) punitive and repressive; (5) protective and guilty: (6) constructive; (7) therapeutic ^{[10, pp. 28-58]}. Which of these techniques fits the case of Lipetsk's Soviet past may be the subject of further research.  In the meantime, the news was encouraging that four streets in the new microdistrict will be named in memory of the Heroes of the Soviet Union in Lipetsk ^[19].  However, all these names, again, belong to front-line soldiers and are associated with the victories of the Great Patriotic War.

The central issue in the understanding of memory is the identification of the role of the past in the construction of the present ^{[20, p. 180]}. The Soviet past, when Lipetsk demonstrated explosive development and acquired its true appearance, is gradually being replaced by new symbolic practices and objects. When the images of the USSR pass from the communicative to the cultural memory, then only the memory of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War will remain, and the opportunities of the Soviet past to "give back" will become less. The founding myth associated with Peter the Great's time and the personality of Peter the Great continues to influence the fate of the city. However, in Lipetsk's desire to find its identity, the orientation to the era of Peter the Great is productive only in terms of generating new myths and images, which is explained by the remoteness in time and the connection with the myth of the foundation. I would like to hope that today the eclectic space of Lipetsk has frozen in anticipation of more adequate forms of reassembly of the Soviet past.

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