Introduction

This book is based on a study conducted in 2020–2022 as part of a collaborative academic project devoted to the regional dimension of memory politics in Russia. Beginning in the mid-2000s, memory policy at the federal level has been shaped by President Vladimir Putin’s thesis concerning the uninterrupted thousand-year history of the Russian state. For this reason, I chose to focus on the regional capitals and their respective regions that could potentially serve as embodiments of what is commonly referred to as “Russian antiquity.” As the upper chronological boundary of the study, I selected the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the period during which the centralized Russian Muscovite state took shape. Accordingly, the range of regional capitals founded before his death in 1584 amounted to fourteen: Pskov, Veliky Novgorod, Vologda, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Smolensk, Ryazan, Tver, Kaluga, Tula, and Bryansk. The object of analysis in this study is precisely the “Russian provinces” which, as the Canadian cultural scholar Lyudmila Parts has noted, for several centuries have been positioned in opposition to the “capital”—at times as a space of monotony and backwardness, at other times as a site for the preservation of “authentic” Russian traditions. The introductory chapter is devoted to the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study and the historiographical context to which it belongs.