Resisting Oblivion: Memory, Agency, and the Local Identity of Protvino’s Residents in the Face of the Loss of the City's Autonomy

• In Event: Cities Lost and Found: Ruptures of Memory, and Nostalgia as Future Making

Abstract

The Russian city of Protvino was founded in 1960 during the construction of the U-70 proton synchrotron as a settlement designed as a utopian space for a residential community of nuclear physicists. Today, the city is in a state of double rupture as it grapples with both the collapse of the Soviet modernist urban model and the challenges of a new political and economic order. In 2024, Protvino lost its prestigious status as a science city ("naukograd"), which conferred significant economic, political, and symbolic privileges, and was subsequently administratively incorporated into the larger neighboring city of Serpukhov.
This study focuses on how Protvino residents and activists construct and defend their vanishing local identity through memory, environment, and agency. In Protvino, the past and memory are not merely objects of nostalgia, but tools for managing the present: activists restore lost artifacts of the Soviet era, defend the urban environment, protect the city's modernist heritage, create new forms of collectivity, and rethink their identity in the context of the shifting administrative, economic, and symbolic landscape that has led to the loss of the city's autonomy.

Author

• Viktor Fedin, Ruhr U Bochum (Germany)