Authors

Discussion

By the late 1980s, debates over Leningrad’s architectural heritage had become a focus of growing civic awareness. The protest against the planned demolition of the Angleterre Hotel in 1987 crystallized these tensions, acting as a catalyst both for public mobilization and for the authorities’ efforts to tighten political control. What began as a local campaign to save a historic building turned into a test case for the limits of civic participation under perestroika – a moment when citizens claimed responsibility for their city, while the state tried to define how far such activism could go. Using archival sources, press, and samizdat publications, the paper shows how heritage activism became a space of negotiation between public initiative and administrative power. Activists used legal arguments and cultural language to present preservation as a civic duty, while local and party officials responded through regulation, supervision, and preventive measures aimed at steering or neutralizing independent action. This case reveals the main paradox of perestroika’s participatory ideals: while official rhetoric promoted openness and public initiative, the state simultaneously built new mechanisms to control it. Heritage activism in Leningrad thus expanded the language of civic participation even as its limits were being redrawn. It became both a product and a boundary of late socialism – a field where citizens and authorities tested how much autonomy was politically possible on the eve of the Soviet collapse.