Heritage experts fear that the Russian government’s ambitious Rb30bn ($564m) plan to restore the city of Vyborg—a historic town at the crossroads of Swedish, Russian and Finnish culture—has come too late, as the city is on the verge of ruin. The project is part of the government’s larger plan to promote the restoration of previously overlooked historic cities as tourist destinations in the wake of crippling economic sanctions imposed by the West over Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
“There needs to be immediate work on the [city’s] fortress, as part of the wall has already collapsed,” says Mikhail Milchik, the deputy director of St Petersburg’s Research Institute of Restoration, who has written a history of Vyborg and says that it is one of the oldest cities in northern Europe. The wall around Vyborg Castle is part of a complex built in 1293 by Swedish crusaders who marched against the Finns and sought to destabilise Russia’s Republic of Novgorod, early in Vyborg’s complicated history.
Control of the city, which is around 130km north-west of St Petersburg and a three-hour drive from Helsinki, has changed hands several times over the years. It was seized from Sweden by Peter the Great in 1710 and became part of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812. The Soviet Union took Vyborg, then called Viipuri, from Finland during the Second World War. It is a potentially symbolic site in the context of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and is a major crossing point for commercial and tourist traffic between Finland and St Petersburg.
Milchik says that efforts were made to restore Vyborg Castle and some fortifications in the 1970s and 1980s, but that the situation “became drastically worse” in the post-Soviet era. “Urgent measures are required,” he says. Milchik is happy that the Russian authorities have earmarked funds to restore the site, but warns that they must be used properly. “Sometimes, rather large funds are allocated, but they are not always used rationally and correctly, not to mention the danger of all kinds of corruption,” he says.
“From a purely architectural point of view, Vyborg is an incredibly diverse city,” Milchik says, noting its mix of Medieval and Neo-Classical styles as well as northern Art Nouveau or Secession stone buildings, many of which retain their original ornaments and reliefs. The city also has Modernist buildings from its two decades as part of the Republic of Finland, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. These include a library built by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto between 1927 and 1935. A joint, two-decade Finnish-Russian project to restore the library was completed in 2013. Ruins are all that remain of a train station that was built in 1913 by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, the father of Finnish-American architect and designer Eero. The site was destroyed during the Second World War.
The activist Dmitry Litvinov, from St Petersburg’s Living City organisation, blames local authorities’ inaction for the fact that other historically significant parts of the city have fallen into ruin. Unlike Moscow and St Petersburg, where profit-hungry developers knock down buildings to build new ones, the local government in impoverished Vyborg “thinks it’s easier to tear them down” than to restore them. For example, in 2013, a block of pre-revolutionary buildings was razed on the pretext that falling bricks could harm residents. In 2014, Litvinov photographed a fire that had broken out in an abandoned, late 19th-century building designed by the architect Fredrik Thesleff. The authorities had failed to protect it from vandals.
Litvinov believes that Vyborg needs a “smaller, faster” renovation of 50 buildings “to preserve their original structure”, rather than the larger, more ambitious masterplan proposed by the government. Grigory Pirumov, Russia’s deputy culture minister, says that Vyborg will be restored according to the principle of “the city as an integrated monument”.
On the website of the Vyborgskiye Vedomosti newspaper, the local journalist and activist Andrei Kolomoisky recently accused the regional authorities of refusing help from qualified restorers, who are ready to carry out emergency work on the fortress free of charge. Bureaucrats, he said, prefer to wait for budgetary funds. The region will receive funding for the restoration of Vyborg Castle from the World Bank as part of its Preservation and Promotion of Cultural Heritage Project for north-west Russia.
“It is my deep conviction that Vyborg cannot be restored,” Kolomoisky wrote. “The scale of architectural losses is comparable to that inflicted by the Taliban on the Bamiyan Buddhas, or those caused by Islamic State to 3,000-year-old Mesopotamian sculptures.”