Victoria Donovan is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Director of the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of research articles in Antropologicheskii forum, Slavic Review, Slavonica and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award holder.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Phoenixes from the Ashes: Postwar Reconstruction as a Patriotic Duty2. Zapovedniks or Tourist Resorts? Marketing Heritage to National Audiences3. Landscapes of Living History: Folk Architecture in the National Imaginary4. Burnt-Out Fairy Tales: Preservation as a Metaphor for Loss After Socialism5. Guardians of Our Heritage: Rebranding the Northwest in the Putin Era6. "Every Centimeter of this Ground is History": Heritage, Narrative, and IdentityConclusionAppendixSelected BibliographyNotesIndex

Victoria Donovan's book on preservation, architecture, and regional identity in Northwest Russia provides a useful corrective to works that have looked at the attempts to preserve medieval and folk Russian architecture as an episode mainly in Russian nationalism and chauvinism.(The Russian Review) Chronicles in Stone tells us a great deal, not only about patriotism and the imagined nation but also of how historical memory is curated by regional actors, as well as the struggles and deal-making between the political centre and the periphery.(Europe-Asia Studies) [Donovan] skillfully weaves her rich and detailed discussion of local dynamics into the national context of the past and present.(Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (JSPPS)) Whereas studies of such topics underscore the rupture of 1991, Victoria Donovan's monograph emphasizes the continuities of the postwar Soviet society in the present. Her book is part of a recent trend in historical scholarship to investigate the protection, preservation, and restoration of cultural heritage in state socialism societies.(AB IMPERIO)