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Almost LovableSheila Fitzpatrick

Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings by Owen HatherleyAllen Lane, 613 pp, £25.00, June, ISBN 978 1 84614 768 5

Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful. The Poles notoriously

loathed the Palace of Culture and Science that was the gift to war­ruined Warsaw from the

Soviet elder brother or – as the Poles saw it – master. Foreigners and sophisticated Russians

sneered at Moscow’s wedding­cake buildings and lamented the old Tverskaya that had

undergone a Stalinist remake as Gorky Street. Some people cherished the onion domes of

17th­century Muscovy, others the grand classical façades of 18th­century St Petersburg, and a

few even idolised the dilapidated remnants of 1920s Constructivism in Moscow, but there was

a general consensus that Stalinism of the 1930s­50s was the pits. I was one of those trekking

around Moscow in the late 1960s, a worn copy of P.V. Sytin’s 850­page From the History of

Moscow Streets in hand, to see what monstrous acts had been committed against innocent

buildings in Stalin’s time. I don’t know how Sytin ever got that book published. It first came

out in 1948, illustrated with smudgy non­glossy photographs, light grey on the yellowing

pages, with new editions in 1952 and 1958, each adding hundreds of pages of street by street

and building by building close description. I suppose the censor accepted it as a celebration

of Stalinist transformation, even if the intelligentsia read it as a lament for the pre­

Revolutionary imperial Russian past. It’s been reprinted several times since the collapse of the

Soviet Union, but who knows in what spirit of Stalinist nostalgia people read it these days.

Now, Owen Hatherley tells us, the Poles actually like their Palace of Culture.

Moscow State University in its heyday (c.1953).I’ve noticed before the strange tendency of hateful buildings to become almost lovable after

the passage of decades. Not all of them, of course. Some, like the 1960s highrise clones lining

Moscow’s New Arbat (Kalinin Prospekt) become more annoying as they get shabbier. But the

Moscow State University building on Lenin Hills, one of Moscow’s seven late­Stalinist

wedding cakes, has definitely undergone a metamorphosis in my mind. When I lived there in

the late 1960s, I regarded it as an anti­people monster, guarded by dragons who, if you had

lost your pass, would throw you out to die in the snow. (According to Hatherley, they now use

swipe cards to protect the building against invasion.) But I noticed a while back that I had

started regarding the wedding cakes with something like affection; apparently the passage of

time has naturalised them.

But Hatherley is young, and so are the Poles who like the Palace of Culture; their

reassessment must come from somewhere else. Actually it seems to come from two different

places. One is the Western pop/youth phenomenon that might be called Soviet ruin chic – a

fascination with Soviet imperial ghosts or, as Hatherley puts it, ‘tourism of the counter­

revolution’. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, with its memorable imagery of the Zone, is a

reference point here, as is real­life Chernobyl, now a tourist destination for those with a ‘ruin

chic’ sensibility. Hatherley distinguishes his own position from that of the admirers of Totally

Awesome Ruined Soviet Architecture, and his ideological and personal baggage is definitely

not counter­revolutionary. But there’s some family – or perhaps more accurately,

generational – resemblance.

The other place this re­evaluation comes from is Eastern Europe, specifically young people

who grew up in the Soviet bloc at the end of the communist era, and don’t share their

parents’ bad memories. Hatherley travelled around the old Soviet empire with his Polish

partner, Agata Pyzik, who in 2014 published her own take on East­West culture clashes, Poor

but Sexy. Freelancers in their early thirties, they live with one foot in London and the other in

Warsaw. Agata is the one with Russian and, as a reading of Poor but Sexy suggests, a

penchant for film and cultural theory. Hatherley is the one with the eye, the architectural

knowledge, and a childhood background in Militant Tendency. They make an entertainingly

observant couple as they wander round Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vilnius,

Kiev, Riga, Tallinn, Bucharest, Sofia and the rest, on the look­out for good cheap meals as

well as striking cityscapes and ‘weird’ (a favourite word, generally approving) buildings.

Hatherley has quite a weird background himself. Son of Trotskyists and grandson of members

of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he grew up in the 1980s on a Southampton council

estate whose ‘cottage’­style buildings he disdained. The brutalist 1960s tower blocks nearby,

with their concrete walkways and windswept precincts, seemed by comparison excitingly

modern and glamorous. Poignancy was added when some of the towers were demolished

during his childhood. He first made a splash with his love song to architectural brutalism,

Militant Modernism (2008), and the larger­scale A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

(2010), reviewed in these pages by Will Self. Hatherley confesses to ‘nostalgia for the future’ in

Militant Modernism, ‘a longing for the fragments of the half­hearted postwar attempt at

building a new society, an attempt that lay in ruins by the time I was born’. It makes sense

that he should follow up New Ruins of Great Britain with a survey of the ruins and residue

of the Soviet empire.

Hatherley didn’t go round Moscow with Sytin in his backpack, and indeed it’s hard to

imagine any point of connection between his sensibility and that of the Russian intelligentsia.

Žižek is a hovering presence, and there is a dash of Boris Groys as well. Hatherley would like

to think the communist regimes did something right in creating living space for their people

and hopes to find some elements of ‘real socialism’ in their built environments. But there’s

always something like a wry grin on his face when he hints at these hopes. ‘Like many Soviet

ideas,’ he writes in frustration at one point, ‘it is so obviously right and so obviously botched.’

Architecturally, his core allegiance is to modernism (the brutalist and utopian kinds, not the

defanged ‘Ikea modernism’, which he disdains), but he has developed a certain affection for

Stalinist monumentalism.

Reading the book, I felt sure that Hatherley had done most of his travelling in summer

because, despite his affection for Stalker, he seems relatively unaffected by the sense of

existential insignificance, exacerbated by cold, that the vast empty spaces of Stalinist city

planning can induce. For me, the quintessential meaningless Soviet space was the illegible

void between Manezh and the National, Metropol and Moscow hotels near Red Square.

(Now it’s bad in a different way, with multiple lanes of traffic shooting through en route to

somewhere else, and a vast commercial mall underground.) As my Sytin told me, the

illegibility was the result of the wholesale destruction of the streets and houses that used to

make sense of the space, the result, that is, of a violent, apparently purposeful activity that

wasn’t in any real sense planned. I took that as a metaphor for a lot of things in the Soviet

Union.

Hatherley has a tough­minded approach to huge empty spaces, although he acknowledges

that crossing them can be daunting. He views my bête noire, the 1960s­modern Kalinin

Prospekt, with relative equanimity, finding it a plus that its wide pavements, lined by

‘ridiculously priced department stores’, bring in the crowds. Old Arbat, running parallel, has

kept its early 19th­century buildings mainly intact in what is now a kitschy pedestrian zone

where foreign tourists buy matryoshka dolls and drink beer. The (post­Stalinist) ruin of the

Arbat was a great cause of intelligentsia outrage in late Soviet times, but it’s typical of

Hatherley’s sensibility and frame of reference that this doesn’t even rate a mention; it’s not his

form of nostalgia.

Stalinallee (now Karl­Marx­Allee) in Berlin is more in his line, a monster that can inspire

admiration and disapproval at the same time. Hatherley nails it as ‘by its very existence an

indictment of the vainglory, hypocrisy and dubious claims to “socialism” of the Soviet­backed

state’ but can’t deny ‘that every time I have visited it I’ve found it hugely exhilarating’. He

compares it to the Paris boulevards, and finds that it expresses ‘a socialism with real

generosity and grandeur, all its hierarchical features subordinated to the rule of the public’s

footsteps’. The street may be too wide for pedestrian comfort, but at least it is a street, and a

‘surprisingly convincing’ one.

I’m confused by Hatherley’s perspective on streets. I would have thought that as a modernist

and an admirer of council tower blocks in Britain, he would have been against them. But he

seems to make an exception for the Soviet­bloc version of grands boulevards, and sometimes

he even likes smaller streets, including (surprisingly) those in East Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel or

Warsaw’s old town that have been rebuilt with more or less fake ‘historic’ buildings

(Mariensztat in Warsaw is ‘surely the cutest thing ever implemented by the Six Year Plan of

an iron­fisted Stalinist regime’). Where he seems most conflicted is on Soviet­bloc housing

estates, whose streetlessness is one of the depressing things about them, especially for visitors

tramping around in the dark trying to find, say, No. 25, block 5, entrance 3, without benefit

of footpaths, adequate lighting or a clear numbering system. The problem is that, on the one

hand, Hatherley is bound to reject ‘the architectural views of Charles Windsor’ (elsewhere, he

gives him his title) that such housing estates are ‘impersonal, mechanistic, inhumane, boring,

ahistorical’. On the other hand, Agata spent part of her Warsaw childhood on one of these

council estates, and ‘I defer to [her] judgment: it was incredibly depressing living here and

she would never do so again under any circumstances.’ So he concedes that ‘something went

seriously wrong when these places were made.’ Their current Warsaw residence, where he

wrote the book, seems to be a compromise, strategically located just on the break point where

the (mostly 1930s) houses and streets stop and the housing estates begin. Some visitors find

the towers looming outside their window intimidating, but to Hatherley the area ‘has a

certain bleak big­city frisson to it, the feeling that you are in some Varsovian remake of Wong

Kar­Wai’s Hong Kong’.

His perspective on Stalinist architecture and aesthetics is also a bit confusing – in a lively and

entertaining way. This architecture, he says, can be ‘scary’, even ‘evil’, unambiguously related

to Stalinist despotism, with ‘the psychoses that created them easy to read’. Of Moscow’s

wedding­cake buildings, he writes that ‘the city centre is literally encircled by six advancing

skyscrapers, each with a towering, scraping spire, all of which bear down on you, paranoid

and threatening, like an Inquisition; try to escape, and another is waiting for you, wings

outstretched, at the Lenin Hills.’ The meeting hall of the Czech National Memorial in Prague

‘is one of the most memorable, and terrifying, spaces created by Stalinism anywhere in

Europe’, with ‘its cyclopean scale and use of so much red marble that you’re practically

irradiated as you walk around’. The House of the People in Bucharest (now Palace of the

Parliament), a 1980s Romanian­designed pyramid, is ‘compellingly alien and sinister’.

Fronted with a ‘defensive escarpment dense with trees’, its monumental front entrance is

impossible to approach on foot. Hatherley and Agata both instinctively hate it, but that

reaction worries them – evidently they aren’t meant to be knee­jerk haters of Stalinist

monumentalism. Why not, I wonder. But that becomes clear when we get back to Warsaw,

their central point of reference in the Soviet empire.

*

Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science was designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev in

1952, the last year of Stalin’s life, and completed in 1955. Once, Hatherley notes, it was hated,

but now young Varsovians are passionately attached to it. Agata’s ‘support of the building is

unyielding – when she saw the Moscow Seven, she immediately pronounced them inferior to

their Russo­Polish sibling.’ It’s not only the devotees of radical chic who are attached to the

palace but also the city’s PR people. ‘A generational shift has happened in the appreciation of

the tower, which now appears on mugs, on the city’s promotional literature, on hipster T­

shirts, on adverts, on election campaign posters, as ubiquitous as St Paul’s or the Eiffel

Tower.’ Hatherley concedes that ‘only the most dogmatic modernist or most devoted anti­

communist could possibly prefer the adjacent office towers that were built to break its

emphasis from the 1960s onwards,’ and judges the building to be ‘weird, authoritarian,

excessive and absurd’, which in his lexicon comes across as fairly positive. He only wishes that

it had been possible ‘to design something that is as all­encompassing and magnificent,

terrifyingly dreamlike as this without recourse to myths and lies’.

Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw.The saving grace of the Warsaw Palace, in Hatherley’s eyes, is that, in contrast to the Moscow

Seven, it is a ‘social condenser’, a label borrowed from the Moscow avant­garde of the 1920s

for public buildings offering citizens a range of activities (including, in the Warsaw case, a

multiplex cinema, a swimming pool, a concert hall, museums complete with dinosaurs, an art

gallery and cafés) and thus inculcating collective ideology. The pleasures of being socially

condensed are left a bit vague, probably because Agata was not much exposed to them as a

child, but there are some very likeable riffs about Polish ‘milk bars’ that appear to be public

cafeterias (known in Russian as stolovye) where you line up for food and don’t tip. Hatherley

and Agata particularly like the one in the Bratislava Trade Union Headquarters, where

anyone who walks in can get an enormous three­course meal for about three euros. What

Hatherley values, despite the absence of airs and graces, toilets and any encouragement to

linger over your food, is ‘that sense of filling, slightly stodgy comfort which features so often in

the memories of those who remember “real socialism”’. Perhaps that’s so in Eastern Europe,

but I’m not sure it’s how Soviet citizens would remember stolovye. For Russians in late Soviet

times, ‘filling, slightly stodgy comfort’ was to be found at home, not in the outside world.

Homes, and, for that matter, dachas, are absent from Hatherley’s landscapes of communism.

Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the ‘old apartment’ (the title of a long­running

television programme of the 1990s) that was the focus of nostalgia for a lost ‘socialist’ world.

Hatherley’s ‘Memorial’ chapter includes Berlin’s curious Museum of the GDR on the Spree,

presenting consumer goods of the 1970s and 1980s in a spirit combining Ostalgie and

condescension, but not the nostalgia­infused old apartment museums that sprang up in some

Russian provincial towns.

Come to think of it, those home­made museums could also have gone into the chapter called

‘Improvisation’. For Hatherley, popular creativity has to be part of a real socialist

environment – hence the chapter – but it turns out to be quite difficult to find. He has a nice

discussion of kiosks, a characteristic feature of late and post­Soviet­bloc life apparently on the

wane in Eastern Europe but still alive and well in Russia, where it remains the basic

commercial unit in many squares, underground passages, and around metro stations. My

sense of the Soviet kiosk was that it had squared corners and came in drab colours, but in the

Eastern Bloc they did things better: the K67 kiosk, mass­produced for the Comecon market

until the 1990s, was created in Yugoslavia in 1966 and visibly ‘from that Barbarella period of

pop futurism where everything was curved, brightly coloured and made of wipeclean

surfaces’. The kiosk discussion made me think of the chaotic post­Soviet transformation of

apartment­building courtyards into parking lots and the multiplication of those little car­

sized portable garages that look as if they could be part of a 1920s avant­garde project for

modular living, but that hasn’t caught Hatherley’s eye. He does give us a nice description of

another kind of apartment improvisation, the filling in of balconies by builders capable of

creating a monstrous architectural joke by sticking ‘a mammoth new room … into the front

façade of a three­storey neo­Byzantine block’.

Graffiti, something new and shocking in a Soviet context when John Bushnell’s Moscow

Graffiti came out in 1990, is not one of the forms of popular creativity Hatherley embraces,

perhaps because its absence was (and remains) such a feature of the Moscow Metro, the

focus of Hatherley’s greatest enthusiasm. After lovingly describing the Stalinist opulence of its

different stations, he concludes that ‘these palaces really are for the people,’ that they offer ‘a

glimpse of the practice of everyday life being completely transformed and transcended, with

mundane tasks transfigured into a dream of egalitarian space’. Incontestably better than

their counterparts in the West, they are the ‘most convincing microcosms of a communist

future you can walk through, smell and touch’, a ‘transformation of the everyday that went

further than any avant­garde ever dared’, even though, he concedes, ‘a democratically

controlled socialism’ might have produced environments ‘that don’t feel quite so flung in

people’s faces, that are not quite so monolithic and dominating’. Post­communist consumer

capitalism has sheathed the marble columns in the Kiev Metro with giant advertisements, a

development he dislikes. In Moscow, the only advertisements are for luxury products, each in

a neat standardised frame on the walls beside the escalators. All things considered, the old

socialist­palatial aesthetic has survived the transition surprisingly well – the spectacular

cleanliness and absence of graffiti in Moscow bespeaking unbending official rejection of

popular creativity.

Actually Hatherley underestimates the Metro’s socialist potential in one respect, as he seems

to think that public transport more or less accidentally took the central place occupied by

cars in the West because of the Soviet Union’s industrial incapacity. In fact, a decision for the

public over the private form was taken under Stalin; Khrushchev did his best to continue it,

until, under Brezhnev, car pressure on the part of the citizens proved irresistible. Hatherley

might have given more thought to the way people use the Moscow Metro. There is the recent

and rather extraordinary fact that the whole thing now has wifi, with the result that people

sit smartphones in hand as they once, in Soviet times, used to sit reading books. Metro

stations are still widely used as meeting places, usually on a designated part of the platform

(ignorant of this Soviet­bloc lore, Hatherley once made the mistake of waiting for Agata

outside, near the ticket office, when she, naturally, was down on the platform).

Hatherley is obsessed by the socialist city, and whether parts of it got built, or ever will be.

This ideal socialist city is, of course, quite different from the ‘real socialist city’ that the Soviet

Union and the Soviet bloc produced. It’s a utopian future that never arrived; an archaic

modernism, like Grand Central Parkway in New York, evoking brief pangs of nostalgia as you

zip out to the airport. But there’s another part of Hatherley that can forget socialism and

simply revel in the weird transmogrifications of the Stalinist architectural aesthetic – for

example, in Shanghai, where ‘Le Corbusier meets Lev Rudnev meets neoliberal bling, the

Stalinist city gone high tech, its pinnacles and swags slathered in neon.’

The China excursion, which comes as a kind of coda at the end of the book, is a surprise, but

underlines one of the book’s most valuable aspects, its illumination of a Soviet cultural empire

whose imperial motifs were repeated, transposed and subverted all along a far­flung

periphery. The scholarly world has been slow to develop this theme. True, the concept of

‘empire’ came to the fore when the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc collapsed into their

constituent national parts, but most of the ensuing scholarship focused on the

recovery/reinvention of the national. It’s works like this one, closer to pop culture and

addressed to a broader audience, that most successfully demonstrate the cultural

commonalities that – as with the British and French colonial empires – outlived the imperial

institutions that created them.

The Soviet cultural empire, however, is something of an odd case, in that the Moscow

metropolis didn’t always succeed in imposing its aesthetic will, hard though it tried, because

of the Eastern Europeans’ strong sense that Russia was ‘backward’ in comparison with them,

a sense that the Russian intelligentsia to some degree accepted. Thus the cultural traffic ran

both ways, and some roads in the Soviet cultural empire led not to Moscow, but to Berlin,

Warsaw and Prague. Hatherley doesn’t examine this in any depth, but his Warsaw­centred

perspective makes it obvious. He says at the beginning that his book is about ‘surfaces, and

about the many political and historical things that can be learned from surfaces, especially in

states as obsessed with surface as these’. That’s not wholly true, in that his anxious and

ambivalent feelings about ‘real socialism’ periodically lead him into discussion of political and

economic depths, but it’s true enough to be a welcome relief. I’m tempted to say that anyone

can do depths – that is, launch into generalisations and wrestle with ideology without too

much fear of empirical contradiction – but surfaces are harder. Ideological preoccupations

aside, Hatherley has a wonderful eye for buildings and space, a good grasp of the history that

spawned them, and a deft way of describing them. Sometimes, reading this book, I

recognised things I’d noticed myself; at other times, he showed me something I had missed or

understood differently. Either way, I’d better take his book, big though it is, in my backpack

next time I go to Warsaw, Lviv, Bucharest or elsewhere in the old Soviet empire. I might even

throw out Sytin and take it to Moscow.

Vol. 37 No. 15 · 30 July 2015 » Sheila Fitzpatrick » Almost Lovable

pages 5­6 | 3743 words

LettersVol. 37 No. 16 · 27 August 2015

Sheila Fitzpatrick is right to remind us how unpopular Stalin’s ‘wedding­cake’architecture was in Soviet times (LRB, 30 July). The Poles in particular had more thanjust aesthetic grounds for resenting their Palace of Culture, a ‘gift’ thrust on them by theRussians. This was brought home to me during a tour of that overpowering building in1965. Our group was taken to the public observation platform at the top, where ourofficial guide rather daringly recounted a joke then doing the rounds. A Russian visitorgoes up to admire the view from the observation platform and is pleasantly surprised, ifsomewhat puzzled, to find it jam­packed with Poles. ‘Simple,’ he is told on inquiringwhy this should be the case. ‘It’s the only place in Warsaw from where you can’t see the

ISSN 0260­9592 Copyright © LRB Limited 2015 ^ Top

Palace of Culture.’

John DeweyWareham, Dorset