“Here They Fabricate Rest”: Socialist Leisure in the Former Tsarist Parks of Leningrad in the 1930s

The article examines the problems of creating parks of culture and recreation in Leningrad and its suburbs in the first half of the 1930s. New centers of socialist leisure arose on the basis of palace complexes: Peterhof, Detskoe Selo, Gatchina and Elagin Island. The Moscow Central Park of Culture and Rest was the model of the “cultural combine”. Metropolitan experience was introduced on the territory of the former royal residences, where infrastructure for quiet rest, sports, military-defense training, dancing, concerts and educational work was created. The material was prepared on the basis of archival documents stored in the funds of the State Museum-Reserve “Peterhof” as well as publications of Leningrad newspapers. The study examines the emergence of new leisure strategies for Soviet people. Various scenarios of mass holidays in Leningrad parks of culture and recreation, which gathered tens of thousands of people, were also reconstructed. The author made an attempt to analyze the conditions in which the transformation of the status of these spaces took place: from the tsarist heritage to the advanced achievement of Soviet culture.