M AKING A HOME ON THE NEVA: DOMESTIC SPACE, MEMORY, AND LOCAL IDENTITY IN LENINGRAD AND

of Oxford, for their help. I am also grateful to my colleagues on the project, particularly Al’bert Baiburin and Andy Byford, for stimulating discussions, and to Alexander Bikbov and two of Laboratorium’s anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. This discussion of the concepts and everyday practices associated with domestic life in ‘the city on the Neva ’ draws on work that I am carrying out for a large-scale study of memory and local identity in St. Petersburg.1 In this study, I address the impact of the city’s offi cial past, as constructed by cultural institutions such as museums, monuments, the city planning departments, and the heritage preservation organisation, VOOPIiK (All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture), founded by ministerial decree in 1965. However, alongside these lieux de mémoire in the formal sense, I also look at ‘memory spaces ’ that are often ignored by tourists, but which may spell ‘Leningrad ’ or ‘Petersburg ’ to locals just as much as do the famous views of Vasilievskii Island, the Winter Palace, or the Summer Garden. These include districts (in the sense of a small familiar area rathe