In 1991 the Soviet Union and the city of Leningrad disappeared from the map. The city's then-mayor, the liberal Anatolii Sobchak, remembered 1991 as the year that “we ‘moved’ [pereekhali] from one country to another, from one city, Leningrad, to a completely different one – St. Petersburg.” For the usual metaphor of postcommunist transition (perekhod), Sobchak substituted relocation. In Leningrad–Petersburg, he suggested, the end of the Soviet Union required and facilitated the transformation of Soviet spaces – a transformation that itself was at once symbolized and accomplished by the return of prerevolutionary place names. Writing in 1999, he concluded that “today, all of us, from the smallest to the greatest, are completing a journey in time and space. More than that, in a historical instant, we found ourselves as if in another dimension.”

Sobchak's image of a “move” from Leningrad to St. Petersburg suggests the importance, if not the divisiveness, of urban space for the political struggles that characterized the transitional period and, more generally, for the human experience of the end of communism. The image of citizens leaving their rundown hometown and relocating to a new, post-Soviet city effectively captures the degree to which the transition reshaped familiar places and practices. But it minimizes the contests over the layers of memory attached to the city's streets, squares, and buildings that could not be entirely left behind.