2    A Tale of Monuments in Two Cities

I can trace the roots of this book to two unrelated but impactful early events in my professional life: interning in the conservation lab at Trinity College Library in 1976–1977 while preparation was under way for the controversial Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibition that traveled to and through the United States from 1977 to 1979; and attending an international professional conference in Moscow in late August 1991 as the putsch took place, and where I witnessed a crowd take down statues of early communist leaders. These events also underscore my use of “monumental” in the title of this book.

The usefulness of these examples is threefold: (1) they occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, which makes it possible to take some measure of what has happened since then; (2) as I had direct experience in each event, I have had some three decades to reflect on each; and finally, (3) recent activities in Ireland, Russia, and Ukraine invite us to reflect once again on 1976 and 1991—and to see that some events that relate to heritage may never be “resolved.”

In the Beginning …

In early 1976 the Minister for Education in Ireland, Richard Burke, announced that there would be an international traveling exhibition of Ireland’s greatest treasures, monuments of Irish history that included the Book of Kells (figure 2.1), the Ardagh Chalice, and the Tara Brooch. According to the article in the Irish Times that reported this news, the exhibition Treasures of Early Irish Art was in part “an effort to put forward ‘a happier and truer image of Ireland than the one too often propagated at the present time.’ [Burke] hopes it will ‘persuade as large a public as possible to look beyond our contemporary troubles to the record of a rich and ancient civilization.’”¹ In Ireland the news was greeted by academics and the general public alike with concern. Opinions about the proposed exhibition, as well as updates about its preparation and, later, its travel and reception in the United States, were regularly reported on by the Irish Times throughout 1976 and 1977. Later, in 1978, fresh criticisms were leveled when Treasures of Early Irish Art was reviewed in the New York Review of Books.

Figure 2.1

“In the Beginning,” the Book of Kells, MS58 fol. 8r, 800 C.E. Permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin

One of the exhibition’s several controversies² surrounded the fragility of some of the objects to be loaned, especially the Book of Kells. One Irish scholar has described the manuscript as a “national monument of the kind that everyone has heard of, and of whose nature everyone is, however vaguely, aware.”³ The show was to travel to five American museums⁴ over two years (1977–1979)—a grueling schedule. Were the potential risks worth the perceived public relations benefits? The director of conservation at Trinity College Library at the time, Anthony Cains, was opposed to the lending of even one volume of the manuscript; two of the four volumes were ultimately exhibited. The complete manuscript had left Ireland only once: to undergo conservation treatment by Roger Powell in Britain in 1953. (The first volume, “Matthew,” was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1961, “in aid of a Library extension appeal.”⁵) In addition to the risk of loss that could result from such travel, Cains and others worried that exposing the manuscript to completely different environmental climates from that in the UK and Ireland could cause permanent damage to the vellum or the pigments or both. When Cains lost the battle to prevent the Book of Kells from traveling, he insisted that a world expert on conservation standards for artifacts in transit and on exhibition, Nathan Stolow, be brought in as a consultant. Stolow was well known for his research on and experience with the packing and transport of artifacts for exhibition. He was also an expert on the environmental design of exhibition cases. By the 1970s, he had already published a well-respected book, Controlled Environment for Works of Art in Transit.⁶ He would publish much more on exhibitions and other conservation subjects over the next several decades.⁷ Conservators at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in consultation with Cains and Stolow, designed exhibition cases that could maintain a continuous, controlled environment for the manuscripts.

In bringing in an international expert, Cains used a strategy that others who are mentioned in this book in subsequent chapters have also used: wielding the influence that you have. Cains did not succeed in keeping the Book of Kells in Ireland, but he was able to insist that the highest conservation standards were adhered to in the exhibition preparation. Similarly, as we will see in chapter 6, Richard Nickel came to understand that even when he could not save a particular landmark building, he could convince Chicago’s mayor’s office to pay for complete photo documentation of and research on the particular building that was to be torn down—when there was enough time.

Not everyone was opposed to the exhibition of Irish treasures; some even advocated for it, maintaining that if only risk factors were weighed, few items would ever be lent for exhibition. In a similar vein, Dr. Maureen de Paor, who wrote a chapter in the accompanying exhibition catalog, Treasures of Irish Art, 1500 BC–1500 AD,⁸ pointed out “that we could not reasonably expect other countries to send works on loan unless we were prepared to loan some ourselves.” Dr. de Paor lamented the fact that in exhibitions of Celtic art exhibited abroad in the past, Ireland had been only scantily represented, and she said she was convinced that “a great deal of care and trouble had been undergone in order to provide for the safety of this exhibition.”⁹

In a July 8, 1977, column, de Paor’s husband, Liam de Paor, a regular writer for the Irish Times and himself a contributor to the Treasures catalog, further heralded the benefit of having Irish artifacts widely exhibited. He cited the example of the successful Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibitions.¹⁰ An Irish Times reader soon after shot back that “Dr. Liam de Paor … suggests that it is a good idea that Ireland’s treasures should be sent on a travelling exhibition. It is a deplorable idea. Dr. de Paor cites for his case the successful Egyptian exhibition in London. But there is no comparison between the wealth and abundance of Egyptian antiquities and the few treasures now left in Ireland. It is not necessary to send our treasures on a trip which may cause possible loss or deterioration.”¹¹

Other objections to Ireland’s treasures being lent overseas were voiced in the Irish Times. For example, visitors to Ireland during that time might be “disappointed at finding none of the major early art treasures in our museums”¹² if so many irreplaceable objects were sent out of Ireland at once.

A little additional controversy ensued in New York City. A prominent scholar of early medieval art, David H. Wright, published an essay in the New York Review of Books in which he criticized the show as not only “conceived in secrecy and born in controversy,”¹³ but also poorly displayed (“Truly the Dark Ages revisited, and indeed at times it also seemed like the Black Hole of Calcutta”)¹⁴ and accompanied by a catalog whose “quality is mixed.”¹⁵ In fact, Wright had nothing positive to say about the catalog of which he criticizes the scholarship as well as the photography. A rather anemic response to Wright’s review was launched by David Greene, a former president of the Royal Irish Academy, and published a couple of months after Wright’s review.¹⁶ Rather than refute Wright’s points, he merely states the importance of early Irish art, and thus the exhibition.

And yet, despite the controversies, the Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibition became a blockbuster show, drawing enormous crowds across the United States. The exhibition cases for the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow were modified for permanent use at Trinity College Library. The college created a new exhibit area for the Book of Kells, which, before the traveling exhibition, was perched almost inconspicuously at one end the Library’s Long Room (figures 2.2 and 2.3). Moreover, the United States exhibitions paved the way for later traveling shows in Europe and Australia in the early 1980s, and later. (A complete list of the shows is included in the entry for the Book of Kells in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.) After volume two, “The Gospel of Mark,” was lent to the National Gallery of Australia, the Board of Trinity College decided not to lend the Book of Kells again.¹⁷ But the Book of Kells is such a major tourist attraction today that there are almost always lines to see it—which was not the case in the 1970s (figure 2.4). Certainly, any work as monumental as the Book of Kells will be the subject of new debates in the future.

Figure 2.2

The Book of Kells was formerly displayed in a less prominent area, n.d. Permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin

Figure 2.3

Part of today’s exhibition area, n.d. Permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin

Figure 2.4

The Book of Kells is a major tourist attraction, 2017. Permission of Alexa Zellentin, photographer

“Lenin, Kaput!”

In contrast with the Irish treasures is the case of the “fallen statues” in Moscow, which has been playing out since August 1991 during the putsch to take control of the country from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.¹⁸ Demonstrators used cherry pickers to pull down statues of prominent communist-era leaders (figure 2.5). There was no intention of destroying the statues. Rather, their removal was a symbolic action to signify that a new era was beginning in what was then still the Soviet Union. As of this writing, there still is no permanent home for the statues, though they now reside in a park. Indeed, the statues have been caught up in Russian and Soviet identity politics. Also, perhaps, they have played a role in the drama of remembering and forgetting in Soviet and Russian politics.

Figure 2.5

Russians tearing down Yakov Sverdlov Monument, 1991. Permission of Leonard Kniffel, photographer

In Russia (as in the former Soviet Union), one can find many instances of national and political identity coupled with objects of commemoration. For example, in August 1991, I was in Moscow to attend the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) conference. At the many libraries and archives that IFLA participants visited, we saw examples of deteriorating collections. But the most memorable experience for me was watching with my colleague, the late Susan G. Swartzburg, the statues of early Bolshevik leaders Felix Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Sverdlov being taken down by a crowd using a cherry picker. The fallen leaders were then hauled off by trucks to an unknown destination. What would happen to the statues? Would they be preserved? When we left Moscow a week later, we could not determine their fate.

A partial answer can be found on numerous web postings. Fallen Monument Park was created in 1992. Located outside the Krymsky Val building in Moscow, the park previously has been known as Park of the Fallen Heroes, Park of Totalitarian Art, and Park of the Arts.

According to a website in 2011:

In October 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, smaller socialist realism statues of Soviet leaders and unidentifiable workers and peasants were removed from their pedestals, hauled to the park and left in their fallen form. They were rectified later, although missing original pedestals. In the 1990s these statues shaped the park outline, but as more and more modern sculpture was added and as the trees grew up, they became a less obvious minority. Opening animation in the film Golden Eye and one of the levels in the Ninetendo64 [sic] game of the same name were based on images of the fallen monuments, although in both the game and film the park was located in Saint Petersburg.

In 1995, Muzeon added a World War II section—these sculptures, of the same socialist realism vintage, were never displayed in open air before. In 1998 the park acquired 300 sculptures of victims of communist rule made by Evgeny Chubarov, installed as a single group. The park also holds temporary summer shows of modern artists.¹⁹

The narrative on the website is inaccurate. The first statues were taken down in August, not October, 1991. Susan Swartzburg and I each kept diaries from August 17–26, 1991. Mine records that the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky was pulled down from Sverdlov Square on the evening of Thursday, August 23, and the Yakov Sverdlov statue was removed the next day. At 11:30 p.m. that night a Russian man approached us yelling, “Lenin, Kaput!” In other words, the statue of Lenin would be next.²⁰ We did not witness the removal of any more statues, but our diary entries suggest that these activities would continue on or after August 24. More fundamentally, the web entry does not address the issue of what it has meant to preserve these sculptures. Does this itself signify anything? Apathy? Or is 1991 now as remote as World War II?

That the statues were moved to a park rather than destroyed makes them worthy of study and reflection. And that “they were hauled to the park and left in their fallen form” is worthy of interpretation. Was their placement meant simply as a metaphor for the downfall of the Soviet regime?

The excerpt that follows was copied from the web, on February 10, 2015:

Fallen Monument Park (formerly called the Park of the Fallen Heroes) is a park outside the Krymsky Val building in Moscow shared by the modern art division of Tretyakov Gallery and Central House of Artists. It is located between the Park Kultury and the Oktyabrskaya underground stations.

The origins of this expatriate English name [sic] unknown; in Russian, the park is either simply named Sculpture Park (Russian: Парк Искусств, Park Iskustv) of the Central House of Artists (Russian: Парк скульптуры ЦДХ) or referred to by its legal title, Muzeon Park of Arts.

See figures 2.6–2.8. The shifting web texts make it difficult to establish a consistent chronological narrative.

Figure 2.6

Statues of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. From Flickr Creative Commons

Figure 2.7

Muzeon Park of Arts, 2011. Permission of Anna Okulist, photographer

Figure 2.8

Vandalized Stalin. From Flickr Creative Commons

The future of Fallen Monument Park is uncertain. Yelena Baturina, an entrepreneur, had planned to demolish the gallery building and erect a Norman Foster-designed Orange—a mixed-use project spanning the current territory of the park. The project was canceled, presumably by former President Dmitri Medvedev. Baturina currently lives in London,²¹ having moved there after her husband, Yury Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010, was forced to step down by Medvedev. Foster’s project is not going forward.²²

What is revelatory in the web narratives is how the events of 1991 have been conflated with other historical periods so that the toppled monuments have become a subset of “socialist realism statues of Soviet leaders.” The survival of the statues, for now, indicates a cultural position of great significance: monuments are monuments, and their destruction may have huge implications. Their survival is telling. Also of significance in their current placement is that the curators of Fallen Monument Park have broadened the collection to include modern sculptures; thus the earlier statues “became a less obvious minority.” Now the park—and possibly its statues—are threatened. According to the online travel guide Atlas Obscura, the land may be redeveloped.²³ Will the loss of the park result in the loss of the statues and the memory of August 1991?

Isn’t memory always at risk of disappearing? The short answer is “yes,” and the many reasons for such loss are considered throughout this book. The fate of the statues is reflected in Soviet—and now Russian—collective memory.

The fallen statues are but a window into a more complex social and political landscape that exists in every country. The preservation cannot be complete of any monument that is taken out of its political, social, aesthetic, and/or religious context. This point is important. The statues, where they were originally located, had meaning—in fact, more than meaning: significance. Part of that significance was in the power of their sculptural form, and part was in where they were—prominently displayed in a public place. Removing them from that place and essentially hiding them away in a park, practically buried among many other pieces, seriously dilutes their meaning, their power, their monumental significance.

In 1966, the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historic and Cultural Monuments was founded, a result of pressure at the time by Russian nationalistic intellectuals. They were protesting Khrushchev’s closures and destruction of churches between 1959 and 1964, as well as the extensive rebuilding of Soviet cities, such as Moscow, which led to the tearing down of old buildings, parks, and squares.²⁴ In another piece, Hosking writes that in Soviet societies, “The party leaders are the self-appointed custodians of history. That is the fundamental grounding of their claim to legitimacy.”²⁵

Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, writing on Soviet-era monuments in Moscow, delineate three possible fates for them: co-opted/glorified, disavowed, or contested.²⁶ They describe these as follows: “Co-opted/Glorified monuments are maintained or further exalted. Disavowed sites are literally or symbolically erased from the landscape either through active destruction or through neglect by the state. Contested monuments remain the objects of political conflict, neither clearly glorified nor disavowed.”²⁷

The statues of the early Soviet leaders might fall into all three categories. First they were co-opted—removed from their pedestals and taken to a park for fallen heroes. As time has passed, they have perhaps become disavowed as their place in the park is becoming marginalized—or manipulated. Depending on the fate of the park, the statues may become contested. Should they continue to be preserved? These categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive: the role of the monuments may shift as Soviet history is reinterpreted or as Russian identity changes.

Forest and Johnson noted that the meaning of the monuments has changed with their physical context: “these Soviet icons moved from public spaces representing national identity, to a literal trash heap, to a tourist attraction, and finally to a historical and artistic display.”²⁸ Their article was published in 2002; if the information on the website for the park²⁹ is accurate, and its future is uncertain, the meaning and context of the monuments may change again.

If the statues in Fallen Monument Park disappear or are scattered, and they are remembered, it may be because of their depictions in a James Bond movie or a Nintendo game. Such popular cultural juxtapositions suggest, perhaps, an unintentional cultural bricolage—the combining and recombining of artifacts that result in something new.³⁰ However, in the process, their place in the historical record will change.

Leninfall

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, statues of Lenin were vandalized, dragged through the streets, or even destroyed in Kiev (and in other Ukrainian cities). Vladimir Sorokin compared the “Leninfall” to the statues that were more politely removed in Moscow in August 1991. He points out that the Lenin statues were felled

during the brutal confrontation on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when Victor Yanukovych’s power also collapsed, demonstrating that a genuine anti-Soviet revolution had finally occurred in Ukraine. No real revolution has happened in Russia. Lenin, Stalin, and their bloody associates still repose on Red Square, and hundreds of statues still stand, not only on Russia’s squares and plazas, but in the minds of its citizens.³¹

Sorokin is further of the opinion that Boris Yeltsin’s revolution was “velvet” because it did not bury the Soviet past and did not pass judgment on Soviet crimes. According to Justinian Jampol, however, it will take more than the smashing of Lenin statues to change the course of Ukraine:³² “In Ukraine, the struggle for ownership of the past continues to unfold. And while the protesters’ destruction of monuments might hasten their victory, it does not mean they will have an easy time putting their fragmented country back together.”³³

Meanwhile, in Russia, president Vladimir Putin has recently promoted the preservation of Russia’s architectural heritage following the claim by Konstantin Mikhailov, of the preservation group Arknadzor, that “unchecked construction was threatening the country’s U[NESCO]-listed sites.” Mikhailov holds the president responsible for construction around Zaryadye Park, “a project proposed by Putin to replace a demolished hotel near Moscow’s Red Square.”^34,35 Galina Malanicheva, chair of the central council of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments, has stated that ten to fifteen nationally registered Russian monuments are demolished each year; in 2015 alone, more than eighty monuments were lost. Because of a complicated listing system in Russia, only 10 percent of Russia’s monuments are listed.³⁶ Putin’s newfound enthusiasm for preservation may or may not be permanent.

The Soviet statues bring home two points. First, preserving monuments is clearly more than a physical process or practical measure; it may be powerfully political. There is a fiscal component, as well as emotional and spatial ones, and the practicability of the situation must be addressed: are there people with the expertise and the clout to make preservation happen? But all the expertise, motivation, money, and good intentions to preserve our objects of culture may have no sway in the face of political pressure and power. Ultimately, if Vladimir Putin decrees that all monuments “must go” they will go, regardless of the oratory such an edict will engender from the world (and as considered in chapter 4, “Documenting Cultural Heritage in Syria”).

Second, as Sorokin has suggested, if such drastic measures are taken and monuments must “go,” their preservation may be only as photographs or in memories. And memories are finite. Even the transmission of memories from generation to generation—even with a photographic record (for memories come with people’s interpretation)—dilutes meaning. In the face of political power, monuments are not always preservable and their significance can wane when monuments are saved but their contexts deteriorate.

Troubles Behind, Troubles Ahead?

In Dublin, the four volumes of the Book of Kells have not left Ireland since 2000. However, a recent news item is reminiscent of Richard Burke’s 1976 reference to “The Troubles.” The Alfred Beit Foundation decided in 2015 to auction several paintings that once hung in Russborough House. Maintenance of the historical house is expensive, and sale of the paintings will cover the deficit. The last two people to own the home, Sir Alfred Beit and Lady Beit, were British. In 1974, they were beaten and tied up by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and a number of their paintings were stolen. The paintings were recovered and the couple donated most of them to the National Gallery of Dublin.^37,38 Reminiscent of the press for the Treasures of Early Irish Art exhibition, there is great opposition by some to the sale of the paintings. The public dialogue continues.

Selling the Beit paintings could be seen—in an oblique way—as a form of destruction or loss of cultural heritage. The paintings were significant in their context. They would have been removed from that context, diluting their cultural significance; and they could have wound up anywhere (a truly private and thus invisible collection? A remote museum?). And as those in the preservation field (and in libraries, archives, and museums) have proclaimed for generations: selling off one’s treasures to cover costs of infrastructures is foolish. Important items disappear, the money disappears, the entity that did the selling may survive but with seriously reduced cultural information, and our cultural heritage is diluted. Whatever monuments we have—in the loss of their property—are diminished. Any kind of such dispersal makes our monuments less monumental and flies in the face of preservation.

As a result of my experiences in Dublin and Moscow, I witnessed conservation and preservation concerns playing themselves out on a world stage, embodying the issues that engaged (or enraged) the public. The examples I have given in this chapter illustrate how preservation may be a catalyst for deeper social, cultural, political, and ethical issues. These issues may play out for decades or even centuries. In Ireland, there were strong sensitivities about a traveling exhibition that would remove the country’s treasures for two years. There was a sentiment in some quarters that Ireland had already been looted of much of its heritage. If the plane carrying the items crashed, too many irreplaceable treasures would be lost, a perspective born of Ireland’s history.

In Moscow, in August 1991, preservation came to imply something quite different. A successful coup meant pushing the communist past aside. Statues of early Soviet communist leaders standing in visible public spaces were intolerable to the reformers. Soviet-era legal documents promulgated in 1948 and 1973 sought to identify, maintain, and protect historic and cultural monuments.³⁹ As I have noted, it is significant that protesters took down but did not destroy the statues.

My final Moscow diary entry records: “As we were driving out of Moscow, a group of people was pulling out the base under the statue of Dzerzhinsky that was removed Thursday night. (8/24/91)”⁴⁰ Susan Swartzburg had heard that the statues would be placed in “a park for fallen Soviet leaders.” According to an entry in her diary, there was even talk that Lenin’s tomb on Red Square would be moved to the country.⁴¹

In Moscow, the urge to remove the symbols of political oppression from sight was not trumped by the urge to preserve. Rather, the survival of the statues more likely signifies the lack of tidy political or social resolutions. Antanas Slutkus’s 1991 photograph “Good-bye Party Comrade!” (figure 2.9) illustrates a lack of “tidiness” as we see the top part of the statue has been plucked off its legs.

Figure 2.9

“Good-bye Party Comrades!” by Antanas Sutkus, 1991. Gelatin silver print. Permission of the Art Institute of Chicago

As I have shown in this chapter, monumental preservation has political and emotional components and often the best intentions in the world, facing the political realities, may not be enough to effect true preservation.

In the following chapters, we will see a variety of monumental forces at work on preservation.

Notes

1.  “Book of Kells for Exhibition in US,” Irish Times (February 5, 1976), 7. The “Troubles” referred to the ongoing political and social violence in Northern Ireland and elsewhere at the time. The early to mid-1970s was a particularly turbulent period, with many acts of violence spilling over into the Republic of Ireland and mainland UK. The period is said to have ended with the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

2.  Other controversies included the selection of the items, the alleged political motivations of the exhibition, and the mediocre scholarship. For more information on these, see David H. Wright, “Shortchanged at the Met,” The New York Review of Books 25, no. 7 (May 4, 1978): 32–34; and Wright, “Correspondence,” The New York Review of Books 25, no. 12 (July 20, 1978): 47–48.

3.  Liam de Paor, “The Book of Kells,” Irish Times, February 24, 1976, 8.

4.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Museum; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

5.  Memory of the World Register, Book of Kells, Ref. no. 2010–08, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/register/access-by-region-and-country/ie/ (accessed October 6, 2017).

6.  Nathan Stolow, Controlled Environment for Works of Art in Transit, published for the International Centre for the Study of the Conservation of Cultural Property (London: Butterworths, 1966).

7.  Nathan Stolow (1928–2014) remained active in the conservation field for most of the rest of his life.

8.  G. Frank Mitchell, et al., Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 BC–1500 AD (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), 1977.

9.  Caroline Walsh, “Art Treasures to Be Shown in US,” Irish Times, June 30, 1977, 9.

10.  Liam de Paor, “Irish Treasures for America,” Irish Times, July 8, 1977, 8.

11.  Muriel McCarthy, “Travelling Treasures,” Letters to the Editor, Irish Times, July 13, 1977, 9.

12.  Walsh, “Art Treasures to Be Shown in US.”

13.  Wright, “Shortchanged at the Met,” 4.

14.  Ibid., 2.

15.  Ibid., 4.

16.  “‘Treasures of Early Irish Art’: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books 25, no. 12 (July 20, 1978): 47–48.

17.  Ireland_kells.doc-UNESCO, Memory of the World Register, Ref. no. 2010–08, section 4.1, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/register/access-by-region-and-country/ie/ (accessed October 6, 2017). Volume 2 of the Book of Kells, “The Gospel of Mark,” was lent to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, in 2000, and the volume suffered some damage. See The Independent, Friday, April 14, 2000, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/book-of-kells-damaged-on-australia-trip-279696.html (accessed June 21, 2015). Subsequently, as reported in the Memory of the World Register, the Board of Trinity College Dublin decided that the Book of Kells would no longer be lent.

18.  For example, Vladimir Sorokin, “Let the Past Collapse on Time!” The New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/let-the-past-collapse-on-time (accessed February 10, 2015).

19.  Italics in the original. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Monument_Park (accessed February 15, 2011).

20.  Holograph diary of Michèle V. Cloonan, August 17–28, 1991, and holograph diary of Susan Swartzburg, August 16–27, 1991. Susan Swartzburg took notes in Moscow and created a word-processed document of which I have the photocopy that she sent me in fall 1991; she died in 1996.

21.  From profile of Elena Baturina in Forbes Magazine, n.d., http://www.forbes.com/profile/elena-baturina (accessed December 1, 2016).

22.  Deyan Sudjic, Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture (New York: Overlook Press, 2010), 240–246.

23.  See http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/fallen-monument-park (accessed September 18, 2017).

24.  Geoffrey A. Hosking and Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 69.

25.  Geoffrey A. Hosking, “Memory in a Totalitarian Society: The Case of the Soviet Union,” in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 115.

26.  Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 3 (September 2002): 524–547.

27.  Ibid., 525.

28.  Ibid., 536.

29.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Monument_Park (accessed September 30, 2015).

30.  Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 4–5. She cites as her influence Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, and uses bricolage to mean material goods that conjure up ideas and memories.

31.  Sorokin, “Let the Past Collapse on Time!”

32.  Justinian A. Jampol, “Smashing Lenin Won’t Save Ukraine,” New York Times, March 4, 2014, Opinion and Editorial, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/opinion/smashing-lenin-wont-save-ukraine.html (accessed June 21, 2015).

33.  Ibid.

34.  Sophia Kishkovsky, “Putin Dresses-down Culture Department over State of Monuments,” The Art Newspaper, February 17, 2016, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/conservation/putin-s-dress-down-for-culture-department-over-state-of-monuments (accessed September 9, 2016; this site is no longer on the Web).

35.  Zaryadye Park is an ambitious hybrid landscape design in Moscow that Diller Scofidio + Renfro are creating in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates, Citymakers, and an “international team of experts.” Liza Premiyak, “A Wilderness in the City: How Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Zaryadye Park Could Help Fix Moscow,” ArchDaily, February 15, 2015, http://www.archdaily.com/598907/a-wilderness-in-the-city-how-diller-scofidio-renfro-s-zaryadye-park-could-help-fix-moscow (accessed September 18, 2017).

36.  Kishkovsky, “Putin Dresses-down Culture Department over State of Monuments.”

37.  See http://russboroughhouse.ie/index.php/history/the-robberies (accessed June 22, 2015).

38.  See Christie’s press release: http://www.christies.com/about-us/press-archive/details?PressReleaseID=7887&lid=1&mob-is-app=false (accessed September 20, 2017).

39.  See “The USSR’s 1948 Instructions for the Identification, Registration, Maintenance, and Restoration of Architectural Monuments under State Protection,” trans. Richard Anderson, in “Special Issue on the Preservation of Soviet Heritage,” ed. Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 5, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 64–72, and in the same issue, “1973 Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: On the Protection and Use of Historic and Cultural Monuments,” 74–80.

40.  Cloonan, holograph diary, 26.

41.  Swartzburg, holograph diary, photocopy of typescript. From the entry “Moscow, August 19–24,” unpaginated.