How Two Towns Lost Themselves: The Story of the Inhabitants of Two Russian Towns Who Were Forced to Lose Their Identity

• In Event: Lost Cities in Urban History: Absent Past, Conflict of Memories and Urban Utopia

Abstract

At the end of 2023, the next stage of the administrative reform of the Moscow region, in which small towns and villages were merged with their larger neighbors, was coming to an end.
As part of this stage, the authorities planned to strip two small towns, Protvino and Pushchino, of their city status by merging them with the neighboring city of Serpukhov. Despite their size, their formal legal status of "Naukograd" ("City of Science") reflected their entire relatively short but quite rich history. They were former "closed towns" built from scratch in the 1960s as large scientific centers (Protvino - nuclear physics, Pushchino - microbiology) in the Serpukhov district.
Serpukhov has its own historical narratives. This old town with almost 700 years of history still preserves the memory of its folk heroes and local saints. This difference in local histories has not been taken into account by the regional authorities, who have suddenly revealed a conflict of memories that, as it turns out, has been simmering for decades. The inhabitants of Protvino and Pushchino haven’t wanted to lose not only their formal independence, but also their local identity.
My report will be devoted to the problem of the loss of these newly formed local identities and the role that different versions of the cultural memory of the residents of the three settlements have played in these formation and loss.

Author

• Aleksandr Veselov, Ruhr U Bochum (Germany)