War and Cultural Heritage: on the Way to Restoration. “The Novgorod Phenomenon”

Exemplified by the ‘Novgorod phenomenon’, the paper studies the problem of restoration of cultural monuments lost and damaged during the Great Patriotic War. The restoration began in Novgorod before the war ended, namely, as soon as the city was cleared; it was a unique project to rebuild it from its ruins. Paradoxically, the war provided a chance to implement a promi­sing idea of turning Novgorod into a reserve city; embodied in the General Layout developed under the leadership of Alexey Shchusev (1945). The pivotal change of the city development concept took place in the late 1940s, when, amidst general changes in the state, the Novgorod administration abandoned the idea of a historical and cultural reserve and returned to the pragmatic project of a socialist city as an administrative and industrial center.