Authors

Discussion

This paper explores the phenomenon of voluntary and semi-voluntary participation in cultural heritage preservation in Soviet Russia between the 1960s and 1980s. It reconstructs the emergence and evolution of student-led initiatives, focusing on two pivotal episodes: the creation of the Moscow preservationist student club Rodina (1965) and the restoration campaign of the Solovetsky Monastery initiated by students of the Moscow State University Faculty of Physics (1967). These early experiments gave rise to a wider movement of restoration-construction and supervisory brigades (restavratsionno-stroitel’nye and shefskie otriady), which mobilized thousands of young volunteers in the 1970-1980s—mostly urban students—to spend their summers restoring monuments across the Soviet Union.

The study situates this wave of bottom-up engagement within the broader “retrospective turn” of late Soviet culture, marked by a growing fascination with the pre-revolutionary past. Moving beyond the established focus on heritage professionals and intellectual elites, the paper adopts a social and generational perspective to examine how Soviet youth, especially those educated in the technical sciences, became key agents in proliferating retrospective ideas. It argues that this engagement represented a specific form of proactive conformity: rather than rejecting socialist ideals, these young people reinterpreted them through collective action aimed at safeguarding historical monuments.

Crucially, the paper highlights intergenerational interactions between the Thaw-era youth and older specialists with pre-revolutionary backgrounds. These encounters facilitated the transmission of professional knowledge and cultural memory, while also helping to institutionalize volunteer restoration within the frameworks of the Komsomol and Soviet civic life.

By analysing archival sources, professional periodicals, interviews with former participants and their memoirs, the paper reassesses the social and ideological significance of heritage activism in late socialism. It shows that the restoration movement not only reflected nostalgia for the past but also embodied an alternative mode of Soviet civic participation.