“How is Voronezh not Paris?”

This chapter considers the challenges of regional self-representation in Putin’s Russia, where the official nationalist discourse reconfigures the provinces as strongholds of tradition and true Russianness. Using Voronezh as a case study, it demonstrates that creating a city brand that strikes a balance between the local/concrete and the national/symbolic is problematic, because regional identities are subsumed by national identity, and the provinces remain an amorphous noncapital space. Whether viewed positively or negatively, the homogenous nature of the provinces poses a problem to identity projects, so that city branding becomes an exercise in mythmaking, unconstrained by, or ignoring, all existing regional traditions, identities, and even realities.