Two rather stale but dispiriting items of news: open letters from professional communities in defence of the restoration sector

The first is addressed to the Minister of Culture, Olga Lyubimova, and to the presidential adviser on culture, Vladimir Tolstoy. In it, specialists in the preservation of cultural heritage report (though this is common knowledge anyway) the catastrophic, critical state of the sector, which they describe as "in essence destroyed as a result of legislative and structural changes". You will remember for yourselves how many scandals have surrounded the so-called restoration of monuments of history and culture of late. It is precisely now that the notion of "scientific restoration" is being replaced, at the legislative and legal level, by the term "repair and restoration works". This, on the whole, distorts the essence and aims of restoration and reorients its tasks exclusively towards commercial gain, both in the course of the works themselves and in the later operation of the cultural sites, while the preservation of the historic appearance as such ceases to be a priority.

The second letter, from more than 300 architects and restorers, has been sent to the President. The professionals ask him to look at a draft law of the Ministry of Construction that would place restoration works under the control of builders. Handing restoration works to a single customer in the sphere of construction in effect means uniting the irreconcilable, restoration and construction. In the process, restoration will simply be replaced by the building of replicas, with the complete loss of historical substance. The specialists are convinced that restoration must remain in the charge of the specialist Ministry of Culture, which, for all its shortcomings, is still the safer option than handing the sector to the Ministry of Construction, which would in fact destroy it.