SUMMARY:

The articles argues that during the last Soviet decades, preservationist activism focused on sites of historical heritage mobilized public interest and produced cohesion of the Soviet intelligentsia as a collective social actor and thus a distinctive social group. This approach deconstructs the notion of “intelligentsia” as an elusive self-referential entity – a stable community of formal status. Instead, “intelligentsia” is interpreted as a situational product of a social process that demonstrated groupness only inasmuch as its participants shared common scenarios of activism. The article specifically studies the case of the Valaam archipelago in Lake Ladoga, the site of a fourteenth-century Orthodox monastery, as a venue for developing in the 1960s–1980s the cohesiveness of the intelligentsia as an emotional community and a collective social agent. Since the mid-1960s, Valaam has been a popular tourist destination that attracts Soviet citizens seeking to “perform cultureness” by experiencing exquisite “cultural consumption.” With old monastery buildings neglected or occupied by retirement homes for war veterans, Valaam emblematized cultural ruins. As a powerful symbol of historical discontinuity and loss, it was an ideal object for the rhetoric of salvation developed by Soviet preservationists. People who shared this rhetoric and concern coalesced into a group that has typically been identified as “intelligentsia.” Some of the activists moved to live on Valaam more or less permanently, forming the local cultural elite who considered it a place for communal work and spirituality. Through the late 1980s, the community of Valaam preservationists mobilized and politicized by escalating the rhetoric of loss and identifying the Russian Orthodox Church as a force capable of restoring Valaam to its alleged former glory. Such rhetoric and the practical scenario brought together various groups of preservationists into a single community of social action. However, when the Russian Orthodox Church eventually fully legalized and firmly established itself in the political sphere, the result was disappointing to the intelligentsia activists. The return of the former monastery to the church, an event wholeheartedly propagated by the old Valaam keepers, made the intelligentsia redundant and even discredited them as members of the Soviet establishment. No longer having a common mission and single object of devotion, they lost their former discursive unity and group cohesiveness, and thus experienced bitter disillusionment with their goal and mission.