1. Quoted in Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (MIT Press, 1992), p. 204.
1. Leszek Kołakowski, ‘What is Socialism?’, in Is God Happy? (Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 20–25.
2. And one didn’t even need to visit to come to this knowledge – see his staggeringly ingenuous 1950 letter to The Times, on the propaganda magazine USSR in Construction – ‘crowds of brightly dressed, well fed, happy looking workers … nobody who sees these publications will ever believe our tales of a half-starved population dwelling in Belsen camps under the lash of a ruthless tyranny’. Reproduced in R. Palme Dutt, George Bernard Shaw: A Memoir (Labour Monthly pamphlets, 1951).
3. On this generation – exemplified in the figure of Timothy Garton Ash – one witty account is J. Hoberman’s ‘Life in Czechoslovakia’, on Philip Roth and others getting their love-amidst-the-secret-police kicks in Prague. J. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis (Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 121–39.
4. Agata Pyzik, ‘Toxic Ruins: The Political and Economic Cost of Ruin Porn’, in Architectural Review Asia Pacific, no. 128 (2012).
5. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn recalls that after a wave of arrests of intellectuals at the end of the 1940s, a newly arrested inmate of the camps gave lectures on Le Corbusier to fellow prisoners. That’s in the camps. See Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (Collins, 1974), p. 603.
6. Hugh D. Hudson, Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture (Princeton, 1994), extensively documents the persecution of unrepentant Modernist architects under Stalin.
7. For instance, Jonathan Meades’s insightful accounts of Nazi and Soviet architecture are notably devoid of the slightest sympathy with the politics of either. Both are in the anthology Museum Without Walls (Unbound, 2012).
8. For an example of this, see the monograph Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 (Monacelli, 2012), by the adviser to Prince Charles and planner of Poundbury, Léon Krier; here, despite the attempt to present the book as a neutral and brave study of the architecture of a supposedly great architect who was also a war criminal, the author’s politics frequently leap out, Dr Strangelove style. Krier entirely fails to disguise that his enthusiasm for Speer coincides with a decided sympathy for an environmentalist variant of fascism.
9. Marx’s long letter to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich suggested that he envisaged that a transition to socialism could happen in some countries bypassing capitalism altogether, via pre-existing peasant communes; though he certainly didn’t imagine that this would happen first, let alone only here. The ‘Letter to Vera Zasulich’ and its various drafts are available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm. For an argument – soon to be heretical – that Marx knew very little about Russia and understood less, see the unorthodox Bolshevik and historian David Riazanov’s 1918 Marx and Anglo-Russian Relations and Other Writings (Francis Boutle, 2003).
10. The classic text here is Trotsky’s still highly pertinent ‘Results and Prospects’ of 1906, available along with a later, much more cantankerous and dated defence of the same theories in Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New Park, 1982), though an excellent summation of it is given in the introduction to his History of the Russian Revolution: ‘the privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.’ Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Pathfinder, 1987), p. 5. Moreover, the massiveness of what Russian industry there was by 1917 – huge concentrations of high-tech factories with a huge labour force which remained islands in a mostly agricultural country – ‘does not disprove this backwardness, but dialectically completes it’ (p. 10), as ‘in Russia the proletariat did not arise gradually through the ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past as in England, but in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. It is just this fact – combined with the concentrated oppressions of Tsarism – that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought – just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organisation’ (p. 11). The implication – not followed through by the author – is that more ‘even’ capitalist economies were much less prone to socialist revolution. So it has proved. And ironically, this extreme unevenness pervaded the ‘communist’ landscape, and even more so its aftermath.
11. The best book on the revolt – perhaps the only historically reliable one in English – is Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, 1991).
12. The key text here is Engels’ 1873 essay on housing, where he defines the term ‘Haussmann’ as ‘breaking long, straight and broad streets right through the closely built workers’ quarters and lining them with big luxurious buildings’, a ‘luxury city pure and simple’, an attempt to design out barricade fighting, and an effort to ‘create a Bonapartist building trades proletariat’ dependent on the government. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (Progress, 1979), p. 71.
13. Profiled in Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution (Braziller, 1970), and critically analysed in Ross Wolfe, The Graveyard of Utopia (available at http://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ross-wolfe-the-graveyard-of-utopia-soviet-urbanism-and-the-fate-of-the-international-avant-garde.pdf).
14. J. Hoberman notes in passing that ‘in considering the region, one has to wonder whether Communism constructed the other European reality or whether this reality – as Lenin himself feared – had, in fact, made Communism what it became’. The Red Atlantis, p. 290. Rudolf Bahro makes a similar point in more typically dialectical fashion: ‘The Hungarians have a long experience with what [their former Prime Minister] András Hegedüs described as “a system of organised irresponsibility”. In the days of Maria Theresa, the Hapsburg army had a saying, “better do nothing, than do something wrong”. This mentality prevails in any bureaucracy where the members are responsible to and dependent on only those above, and have absolutely no powers of horizontal cooperation’. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (New Left Books, 1978), p. 114.
15. This analysis owes much to Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Verso, 2012). Anderson notes that there were two other empires which were influential across this territory – the Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Balkans and had a much more unplanned form of urbanism, informal and with less public or ceremonial space, and until the late eighteenth century the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, while Baroque in its architectural tastes, was a realm dominated by vast serf-tended rural holdings that seldom embarked on large-scale town planning, with exceptions such as the Renaissance town of Zamość in eastern Poland.
16. On this continuing legacy, see Wolfgang Förster, ‘80 Years of Social Housing in Vienna’, at www.wien.gv.at/english/housing/promotion/pdf/socialhous.pdf.
17. A comprehensive study in English is Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna (MIT Press, 1999).
18. Kaganovich quoted by Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, trans. Eric Dluhosch (MIT, 2002), p. 94. On Magnitogorsk and its holes in the ground, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (University of California Press, 1997).
19. For some remarkable analyses of the Soviet building industry and the exploitation of workers in even the most idealistic architectural schemes, see the chapters on Moscow in Jonathan Charley’s essay collection Memories of Cities (Routledge, 2013).
20. ‘The social strata [of Soviet managers] had some analogies to that of a nineteenth-century ruling class … somewhat fanciful analogies have even been detected in their aesthetic attitudes: a moralising literature, a strictly representational art, and an ostentatious architecture’, E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929, vol. 2 (Pelican Books, 1976), p. 470.
21. An excellent account of this abrupt attack on working class organisation can be found in Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (Haymarket, 2005).
22. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (Pathfinder, 1972), p. 286.
23. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World (Free Press, 1985), p. 69.
24. Ibid., p. 97.
25. Maxim Gorky, ‘Extracts from a paper read to the first all-Union congress of Soviet writers’ (1934), in Literature and Life (Hutchinson, 1946), p. 140.
26. Gorky, ‘A Talk with Young People’ (1934), in Literature and Life, p. 145.
27. This had been underway since at least the mid-1920s. If the USSR began as a country so radically anti-nationalist that it didn’t even include a territory in its name, through the course of the 1920s ‘Soviet Russia’ came to fill the void created by the absence of a Western European revolution – it ‘became more and more openly the heir of Russian state power and attracted to itself traditional feelings of Russian patriotism, it claimed its mission in terms which conveyed to sensitive ears unmistakable echoes of the Russian past … The fulfilment of the eschatological promises of Marxism was delayed, like the Second Advent, far beyond the original expectations of the faithful; and, when this delay bred the inevitable current compromises with power and expediency, the process of degeneration from the pure ideal took on specifically Russian forms within a Russian context. Primitive Christianity decked itself in the trappings of imperial Rome, communism in those of the Russian national state’. E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country (Pelican Books, 1970), pp. 31–2.
28. The best way of understanding this key concept is via Terry Martin’s study of the USSR as an ‘affirmative action empire’. In short, the ‘form’ of nationalism – costume, national literature, language, cultural signifiers – was vigorously encouraged and its exponents promoted to leadership positions, while the ‘content’ that usually comes with these – claims of national superiority, demands for separatism or independent states, even demands for federalism within the Union – were ruthlessly suppressed. As a result, the USSR had a rather essentialist liking for nationalist cultural expression, and a tendency to treat nations en bloc – which descended into collective punishment and ethnic cleansing in the case of border nations within the USSR like Poles, Volga Germans, Greeks, Crimean Tatars and Koreans, and then outside it, in the mass expulsions of Germans from Poland, Lithuania, Kaliningrad and Czechoslovakia, and of Poles out of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, after 1945. That is, it was both unusually anti-racist and prone to shocking acts of systematic racialized violence. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001).
29. Sergei Frolkin, VDNKh: Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR (Planeta, 1969), unpaginated.
30. See Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (Verso, 2005), or Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution (Oxford, 1967).
31. Rudolf Meidner, ‘Why Did the Swedish Model Fail?’, Socialist Register, vol. 29 (1993). His claim is corroborated by the comparative statistics on income differentials in Bahro, Alternative in Eastern Europe.
32. On the non-existence (until recently) of ‘social housing’ in Sweden, see Eric Clark and Karin Johnson, ‘Circumscribed Neoliberalism’, in Sarah Glynn (ed.), Where the Other Half Lives (Pluto Press, 2009).
33. It’s worth noting here that the Eastern Bloc bordered countries which had major elements of ‘socialism’ in their economies and in public life – the extensive welfare states and hegemonic Social Democratic parties of Austria and Finland, or to a lesser degree West Germany, with its own Marxist tradition and ‘co-determination’ of trade unions and employers. The seductive mixed economy of capitalism tempered by socialism, beamed into the television screens of Eastern Europe, and directly experienced by Polish and Yugoslav gastarbeiter, was not the capitalism of Reagan or Thatcher. This was, however, the capitalism they would get after 1989.
34. Bahro, Alternative in Eastern Europe, p. 45.
35. That is, roughly until the 1980s. Paradoxically, the period between 1968 and 1986 saw more unorthodox East European socialists lose their faith in the possibility of a desirable non-capitalist society than any other era – even the Stalinist one. Former enthusiastic Stalinists turned reform communists – including many names much fêted in the West, from Kapuściński to Konrad to Kundera, from Kołakowski to Kuroń – were largely by 1989 liberals or conservatives. The reasons are varied, although the cause can hardly have been greater repression, given the extremely mild nature of persecution compared with Stalinism – in the 1970s, dissidence meant an inability to publish, or at worst consignment to a mental hospital, as opposed to torture and certain death in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps more lax censorship made lip service less necessary, the suppression of even the mild reforms of the Prague Spring induced general despair – and horror at the antics of the American New Left helped push Kołakowski rightwards, for instance (as seen in the sad, mutually uncomprehending contretemps between Kołakowski and E. P. Thompson in the pages of Socialist Register). But, curiously, the Eastern Europeans chose exactly this point – with mass workers’ protests shaking the system to its core in Poland – to decide the working class was no longer relevant; they chose the moment when the post-war boom collapsed under the weight of the oil crisis, when unemployment and homelessness returned, to decide that capitalism had proved its superiority. An alternative view is that some intellectuals disliked no longer being quite so important to power as they were under Stalinism – for a pugnacious assertion of this view, see the unrepentant Polish Trotskyist Ludwik Hass’s ‘An Open Letter to Ojasz Schechter’, Revolutionary History, vol. 6, no. 1. Regardless, the upshot was that by the time Gorbachev came to power, there were few ‘Party democrats’ left to back him.
36. Václav Havel, ‘Dear Dr Husák’ (1975), in Open Letters (Vintage, 1992), pp. 58–9.
37. Havel, ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’, in Open Letters, p. 343.
38. Roy Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (Norton, 1977), p. 399.
39. For an exceptionally intelligent, non-triumphalist analysis of the collapse, see Stephen Kotkin and Jan Tomasz Gross, Uncivil Society (Modern Library, 2010).
40. Hillel Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 11.
41. Slavoj Žižek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (Verso, 2001), p. 130. Similarly, in his recent account of Marx’s Capital, Fredric Jameson makes an analogy between the forces behind the re-emergence of capitalism in 1989 and the emergence of capitalism itself in the eighteenth century: ‘the properly capitalist farmer emerges in the person of a hitherto minor character, the bailiff of the estate. Like our modern post-socialist managers, he it is who turns the activity of oversight into the status of ownership, and exploits the land henceforth in accordance with the new “law of value” ’ (my italics). Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital (Verso, 2011), pp. 78–9.
42. This being an early-1990s slogan of the nomenklatura, cited in Boris Kagarlitsky, Back in the USSR (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 34. On the curious popularity of neoliberalism on the part of ‘communist’ academia and the elite in the 1980s, see Patrick Flaherty, ‘Perestroika and the Neoliberal Project’, Socialist Register, vol. 27 (1991).
43. Statistics here can be found variously in Kagarlitsky, Back in the USSR, Rumy Hasan and Mike Haynes, A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Twentieth Century Russia (Pluto, 2003), and Laszlo Andor and Martin Summers, Market Failure: Eastern Europe’s ‘Economic Miracle’ (Pluto Press, 1998).
44. The ephemeral ‘Soviet’ republics of 1919 in Hungary and Bavaria, themselves built on workers’ councils, called themselves the ‘Räterepubliken’ and, in Hungarian, ‘Tanácsköztársaság’. The use of the Russianized ‘Sowjet’ for their system came later.
45. Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge University Press, 2002). A less poetic, empirical account of Soviet-influenced architecture during this period comes to strikingly similar conclusions: Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (MIT Press, 1992). In terms of ‘urbanism’, there is only one synoptic book, R. A. French and F. E. Ian Hamilton (eds.), The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (John Wiley and Sons, 1979), which has a useful definition of what made Soviet-style cities ‘an entirely separate category of urban settlement, (with)
a generally much higher population density;
a lack of a density gradient;
a lack of any surface of land values assessable in financial terms;
a lack of a determinable spatial differentiation of social groups;
a far less marked spatial differentiation of function between one part of the town and another;
a relatively low order of service provision;
a distinctive employment structure, with a higher proportion of workers engaged in industry;
a high degree of reliance on public transport; and
as a framework to all the rest, the total concentration of decision-making in the context of development and urban change into the hands of the planners, and the elimination of individual decision or competition’ (pp. 101–2).
We will find evidence of much of this, though a lot is now irrecoverable.
46. The basis of a synoptic study of this territory is provided by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Bodley Head, 2010). This book is very useful reading for anyone casually interested in the period, for its mastery of sources, historical sweep, linguistic promiscuity and harshly readable style – but should often be taken with a pinch of salt, not least for its tendency to downplay or even ignore the less palatable aspects of the countries and regimes between the two big bad hegemons – as usefully pointed out in Dovid Katz’s review in East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 41, no. 3 (December 2011). At worst, its lack of analysis and numbing accumulation of atrocity becomes, as one wag put it, a form of ‘totalitarian wrestlemania’. Worth reading alongside Snyder is Arno J. Mayer’s work on the Holocaust, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (Verso, 2010), which gives due attention to the influence of the area’s pre-1930s history, and especially the bloody, frequently anti-Semitic counter-revolutionary wars of 1917–21.
47. Paul Fussell, Abroad (Oxford, 1980), p. 41.
48. Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books, 2014).
1. Bertolt Brecht, Poems (Methuen, 1976), p. 440.
2. Adam Jonca, Idzie Wojsko (Nasza Ksiegarnia Warszawa, 1976), p. 12.
3. A. Litwak, Moscow (Foreign Languages Press, 1960), p. 47.
4. Statistics on Tverskaya from Vladimir Chernov (ed.), Moscow: A Short Guide (Progress, 1979).
5. Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (1927), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1 (Harvard, 2005), p. 41.
6. The Mayakovsky statue was the focal point of meetings of Moscow youth in the Thaw era, a sort of ‘Speakers’ Corner’ eliminated in the course of the 1960s – see the many references to it in the accounts of 1950s/1960s hipsters in S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Soviet Jazz (Limelight Editions, 2004).
7. There are monuments elsewhere, however, most notably that by the great sculptor Ernst Neizvestny above the former camp at Magadan.
8. Demolished in 2012.
9. Aldo Rossi, quoted in the excellent account of the boulevard in Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 187. For a dissenting view, see Stefan Heym’s 1963 novel The Architects (Daunt Books, 2012), which uses the development of the Stalinallee (here as ‘World Peace Road’) as a way to satirize the Stalinist experience and the Thaw. Challenged by his Modernist-inclined wife, the cynical, Bauhaus-trained lead designer exclaims: ‘You want turrets, Comrade? I’ll put up turrets for you. The authorities want World Peace Road to look like a cross between the Kremlin Wall and the Parthenon, with some Baroque thrown in? I’ll build it to specifications … Why don’t you investigate, as a Marxist should, the origins of our clients’ bad taste? Look at the life these men led, the limitations of their minds, the power suddenly thrown into their hands; enquire into what shaped their sense of beauty, if any, and their dreams of the monument they wish to erect for themselves, and then you’ll see, I hope, that World Peace Road could have been a lot worse than it is!’ (p. 125). The plot hinges on the return of a Gulag inmate and Bauhaus colleague of the protagonist, who proposes to complete the road as a Ville Radieuse, which he imagines will be a modern, confident, agora-like democratic space …
10. Markus Sebastian Braun (ed.), Berlin: The Architecture Guide (Braun, 2011), p. 168.
11. ‘Socialist Realist Palaces for the Common Man’, in Cor Wagenaar (ed.), Happy: Cities and Happiness in Post-War Europe (NAi, 2004), p. 31.
12. On Alexanderplatz, see my Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012).
13. See Bogdan Tscherkes, ‘The Kreschatik’, in Wagenaar (ed.), Happy.
14. The popular principle that ‘if the Soviets said it, it must have been untrue’ has often led to some doubt on this, but just to be clear – there is no serious dispute among historians that, as well as fighting the Soviets, the UPA also tried their best to create a Ukraine for Ukrainians through cleansing it of Jews (co-operating in the Nazi pogroms in Lviv, in 1941) and of Poles (massacring on their own around 100,000 Polish civilians in a campaign of 1943). On the Lviv pogrom, see Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, ‘The “Ukrainian National Revolution” of 1941’, available online at http://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Grzegorz-Rossolinski-Liebe-on-The-Ukrainian-National-Revolution-of-1941.pdf
15. In this, they disprove one of Brecht’s reassurances against Stalinism’s ‘excesses’: ‘at a time when petit-bourgeois conceptions of art prevailed in the government, Mr Keuner was asked by an architect whether he should take on a big construction contract. “The errors and compromises in our art will remain standing for hundreds of years!” exclaimed the desperate man. Mr Keuner replied: “Not anymore. Since the tremendous development in means of destruction, your buildings are no more than experiments, not binding recommendations. Visual aids for popular debates. And as for the ugly little embellishments, the little pillars, etc, put them up in such a superfluous way that a pickaxe can swiftly allow the big pure lines to come into their own. Put your trust in our people, in rapid development!” ’ Alas, the big pure lines turned out to be rather drab, and the ugly little embellishments spoke much more of Soviet originality and otherness. See Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Herr Keuner (City Lights, 2001), p. 93.
16. A fascinating publication by this ‘Maidan left’ is Anastasiya Osipova (ed.), Circling the Square: Maidan and Cultural Insurgency (Cicada Press, 2014), which includes a useful map of the insurgency by Burlaka.
17. A good English-language essay on these lovely urban artworks is Ella Chmielewska, ‘Material Errata: Warsaw Neons and Socialist Modernity’, RIBA Journal of Architecture, vol. 15, no. 1. A good coffee table book, also with English translation, is Ilona Karwinska, Polish Cold War Neon (Mark Batty, 2011). The best place to see them, however, is probably the Silesian city of Wrocław, where a dozen or so of the prettiest and silliest signs are well-restored.
18. Jonathan Raban, Soft City (Harvill Press, 1974), p. 20.
19. Irrespective of its crass anti-communism and extensive ‘but it’s not real capitalism!’ apologetics for its disastrous aftermath, Lucian Boia, Romania: Borderland of Europe (Reaktion, 2001), contains a balanced and informative account of the achievements and hypocrisies of ‘Little Paris’.
20. Ana Maria Zahariade, Architecture in the Communist Project: Romania 1944–89 (Simetria, 2011), p. 24.
21. Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (MIT Press, 1992), p. 137.
22. Stephen Kotkin and Jan Tomasz Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library, 2009), p. 78.
23. Quoted in Zahariade, Architecture in the Communist Project, p. 60.
24. For a comparative account, see Albert Fishlow, ‘The East European Debt Crisis in the Latin American Mirror’, International Organization, vol. 40, no. 2. Thanks to Charles Turner for the reference.
25. The details here, and elsewhere in this section, are taken from Mariana Celac, Octavian Carabela and Marius Marcu-Lapadat, Bucharest: Architecture and Modernity (Simetria, 2009), pp. 76–82.
26. I owe this point to Lucian Boia, Romania: Borderland of Europe (Reaktion, 2001), p. 291 – he suggests Bofill’s Antigone housing project in Montpellier was the specific inspiration.
1. Miroslav Holub, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1967), p. 25.
2. This fact can be found both in positive accounts of the time, like the propaganda brochure USSR: Welfare (Novosti, 1973), and in negative accounts such as that of Florian Urban, where it is seen as proof of the lunacy of the socialist economy.
3. Most of the specifics in this chapter derive from Elke Beyer’s fascinating, comprehensive essay on prefabrication and mass housing, ‘The Soviet Union is an Enormous Construction Site’, in Dietmar Steiner et al. (eds.), Soviet Modernism 1955–1991 (AzW, 2011).
4. For the magical process of unslumming, see Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Pelican Books, 1974), pp. 284–304.
5. Berthold Lubetkin, ‘The Russian Scene: The Development of Town Planning’, Architectural Review, May 1932.
6. Václav Havel, ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’, in Open Letters (Vintage, 1992), p. 343.
7. Roy Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (Norton, 1977), p. 85.
8. Antanas Papšys, Vilnius: A Guide (Progress, 1981), p. 142.
9. Ibid., p. 145.
10. Ibid., p. 146.
11. Jerzy S. Majewski, Landmarks of People’s Poland in Warsaw: A Book of Walks (Gazeta, 2011), p. 102.
12. ‘Meduna borrowed not only the shape of the building but also the scale and placement of the reliefs over the central opening and the coffer detail within the archway’. Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) p. 162.
13. For an interesting series of student projects on possible uses and transformations of these, focusing on the Tallinn microrayon of Lasnamäe, see Reedik Poopuu (ed.), Lasn (Eesti Architektide Liit, 2012).
14. Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930 (Kent State University Press, 2004), p. 54.
15. Ibid., p. 56.
16. Kirill Kobrin, The Last European (3am Press, 2013), unpaginated.
17. Peter Carlson, K Blows Top (Public Affairs, 2009), p. 147.
1. In Joseph Sherman (ed.), From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish Writing, 1917–1952 (Five Leaves, 2012), p. 144.
2. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Pelican Books, 1978), p. 247.
3. Specifically, the ‘Familistère’ in Guise, which is profiled in Gillian Darley, Factory (Reaktion Books, 2003), pp. 67–9.
4. Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution (Braziller, 1970), p. 141; the description is of the Narkomfin flats in Moscow, built in 1930.
5. On this see Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (Monacelli Press, 1997).
6. El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution (MIT Press, 1970), p. 43.
7. It should be noted that this didn’t make it completely typical – Vilnius’s status as the capital of a Union Republic meant that it could obtain resources for these projects better than the average provincial town. Even so, a city with similar status, like Riga in Latvia, did not create spaces this impressive; the talents, and luck, of Lithuanian architects are as much part of this as the policies they carried out.
8. All descriptions in this paragraph are based on information from Rūta Leitanaitė and Julija Reklaitė (eds.), Vilnius 1900–2013: A Guide to the City’s Architecture (Architekturos Fondas, 2013), a particularly informed and prejudice-free work.
9. An account of the ceremony in a contemporary guidebook: ‘The young couples and their accompanying family and friends are escorted by the master of ceremonies into the wide vestibule of ceremonial processions leading through the open suites to the entrance hall. The wedding procession goes through these ceremonial halls – this is the stately spectacle that has determined the designs and entire composition of the palace.’ Antanas Papšys, Vilnius: A Guide (Progress, 1981), p. 137.
10. Let the record show that it was not appreciated by Nikita Khrushchev, who attacked the 35-year-old building for being ‘as ugly as sin’ in a 1962 speech on the awfulness of ‘formalism’. Unlike his precedecessor, his opinions on architecture were not regarded as gospel, and modern architecture was immediately defended in the press. S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 236.
11. As with the Kennedy assassination, the jury is eternally out – for two contrasting accounts, see the confident assertion of guilt in Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Oxford University Press, 1989), or conversely Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (Yale University Press, 2008), whose trawl through the archives at least makes clear that however likely it was he dunnit, Stalin’s culpability is not supported by any documentary evidence whatsoever.
12. They are a little more rare, though we found a few. Prominent in the centre of Moscow and St Petersburg is the retro-stolovaya chain ‘Stolovaya 57’, an oligarch-owned enterprise which has a combination of relatively very cheap food and ominipresent Soviet nostalgia, with the same old posters to be found in every branch.
13. Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 146.
14. I owe this information to Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann and Michael Zinganel, Holidays after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia (Jovis, 2013), pp. 92–3.
15. Catherine Cooke, Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde (MOMA, 1990), p. 45. Cooke was constrasting this with what she regarded as the far worse proposals in the mid-1930s to demolish GUM, the famous and still extant turn-of-the-century shopping arcade.
16. Leszek Kołakowski, ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’, in Marxism and Beyond (Paladin, 1971), p. 234.
17. See Gowan’s pseudonymous ‘The Polish Vortex’, quite the best English-language analysis of Solidarity during its glory days, published under the name Oliver Macdonald, in New Left Review, no. 139, May–June 1983. Gowan argues that the church, ‘far from being a militant centre of “anti-socialist counter-revolutionary mobilisation”, was a settled, conservative and prosperous establishment without any active project for upsetting the status quo. In Poland’s successive political crises, the episcopate had always proved its loyalty by appealing for calm and order in the cities, its message on social questions a mixture of calls for sober hard work and respect for the family combined with denunciations of worldly, secular (and pro-Western) lifestyles, as well as a strong appeal for Poles to love their country and build up its resources. There was no trace of radical democratic ideology within the episcopate.’ However, he argues that the pope was more strongly inclined towards Solidarity, and ‘encouraged a more dynamic and combative thrust within the working class’ than the Polish church itself.
18. This information is from Ludwik Hass, ‘The Tragedy of Solidarity is Its Advisers’, Revolutionary History, vol. 6, no. 1.
19. This anecdote is courtesy of Gavin Rae’s blog Beyond the Transition, at http://beyondthetransition.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/thirty-years-of-solidarity.html.
20. Architektura, no. 5, 1980, p. 12.
21. Le Corbusier quoted in Hugh Pearman, ‘Design for Living’, New Humanist, March/April 2006.
22. Fr Tomasz Bojasiński, Architektura, no. 5, 1980, p. 17.
1. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Red Words, 1994), p. 282.
2. The glassware designer Karel Wünsch claimed to have designed ‘on the basis of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious’. As well he might. See the celebratory Ještěd Phenomenon (City of Liberec, 2008).
3. For a more in-depth analysis of this building and its histories, see my ‘One Better Than Stonehenge: The Gosprom Building and Dzerhzhinsky Square in Kharkiv’, AA Files, 62 (2011).
4. In Joanna Warsza (ed.), Ministry of Highways: A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi (Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 27–8.
5. Ibid., p. 42.
6. Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Moscow Tries to Reinvent Itself as Financial Hub’, The New York Times, 3 April 2013. Choice extract: ‘ “Moscow was never going to be an international financial center,” a Western banker working here, who was not authorized to speak for his employer on the matter, said of the effort. “That was a joke.” So Moscow is setting its sights a little lower. Its biggest problem is to be taken seriously even as a regional center. The midsize companies in neighboring Ukraine or other former Soviet republics are choosing to go public in Warsaw. They are hardly bothering to look at the carefully laid out welcome mat in Russia. Kernel, a Ukrainian corporate farming enterprise, and Coal Energy, a Ukrainian producer of steam coal, listed in Poland, where a policy of investing pensions in the stock market helps the local exchange. The Warsaw stock exchange, in fact, has so many Ukrainian company listings it has a Ukraine index. Micex, the Russian stock exchange, has no such index because it has so few listings.’
7. Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (1927), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1 (Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 43.
8. On Lissitzky, Stalin and the Garden Ring, see Karl Schlögel, Moscow (Reaktion, 2005), p. 23.
9. Bukharin, who had led a behind-closed-doors pro-peasant opposition to what he called Stalin’s ‘Asiatic’ policies, described Stalin as the new Genghis Khan in a private communication (read nonetheless by the security services) with Lev Kamenev: Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Vintage, 1975), p. 291. Valentinov is quoted in Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Pelican Books, 1978), p. 159.
10. Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 248.
11. For a fascinating and incisive political-aesthetic analysis of the Palace (and its complex current status) by an anthropologist and architecture historian, read Michał Murawski’s essay ‘Inappropriate Object’, Anthropology Today, vol. 27, no. 4, August 2011.
12. Agata Pyzik, ‘In Latvia, Riga has become a ghost town’, New Statesman, 22 August 2012.
13. On this battle of the TV towers, see David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, ‘The High-Tech Cold War’, in their edited catalogue, Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (V&A, 2008), pp. 174–8.
14. For an account of these events, see Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), pp. 124–35.
15. On the exhibition and its aftermath, see Sophie Pinkham, ‘The Museum of the Revolution’, The Nation, November 2013.
16. At the twilight of Stalin’s rule, in 1953, Czesław Miłosz wrote: ‘since everything is planned in a socialist economy, why not proceed to a planned satisfaction of the aesthetic needs of human beings? … even now one can see some progress. They are already erecting skyscrapers patterned after the buildings erected in Chicago about the year 1900 – it is possible that in the year 2000 they will officially introduce art forms that are today considered modern in the West.’ In the event, that would take about two years rather than fifty. The Captive Mind (Vintage, 1990), pp. 68–9.
17. Lithuania, like Estonia and Slovenia, has managed to retain a more vivid and imaginative contemporary architecture than larger EU neighbours like Poland or the Czech and Slovak republics, let alone Russia, Belarus or Ukraine; projects from these three small countries appear in Euro-architecture magazines like A10 much more than those from larger ones. It’s a puzzle, but then all three were both unusually well-off and unusually educated in the ‘socialist’ period, as they are now.
18. Joel S. Torstensen, Michael F. Metcalf and Tor Fr. Rasmussen, Urbanization and Community Building in Modern Norway (Urbana Press, 1985), pp. 68–9.
19. Boris Kagarlitsky, Back in the USSR (Seagull Books, 2009), p. 6.
20. I owe this information to Bart Goldhoorn and Philipp Meuser, Capitalist Realism: New Architecture in Russia (Dom, 2006), p. 190.
1. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Progress, 1977), pp. 590–91.
2. That’s not to say they completely neglected the main late-twentieth-century form of international transport. One surreal aspect of Stalinist planning is Baroque airports, such as Pulkovo in St Petersburg; and much later, at Boryspil in Kiev or at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla airport, you can still find multicoloured realist-Futurist reliefs of heroic workers flying through the air.
3. Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs, vol. 3, ed. Sergei Khrushchev (Penn State Press, 2007), pp. 178–9. I owe this reference to the Institute for Conjunctural Research. Also note Khrushchev’s noting of Stalin’s concern for this matter: ‘ “Comrade Khrushchev,” he said, ‘rumours have reached me that you’ve let a very uncomfortable situation develop in Moscow as regards public toilets. Apparently people hunt around desperately and can’t find anywhere to relieve themselves. This won’t do. It puts the citizens in an awkward position.” This episode, trivial as it may seem, shows how Stalin, the leader of the world’s working class, wasn’t too busy to bother himself over as important a detail of city life as public toilets.’ Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1 (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 54–5.
4. Benson Bobrick, Labyrinths of Iron: The Story of the Underground Railway (Newsweek Books, 1982), p. 281.
5. Ibid., p. 275.
6. Ibid., p. 276.
7. On the ‘organs’, see The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 (Collins, 1974), particularly the accounts of interrogation and torture on pp. 93–144.
8. E. Abakumov, The Moscow Subway (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939), pp. 10–11
9. Egor Larichev and Anastasia Uglik, Moscow Metro Travel Guide (WAM, 2008), p. 5.
10. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, p. 87. He continues: ‘I think it’s probably easier to contemplate space flights today than it was for us to contemplate the construction of the Moscow Metro in the early 1930s.’
11. Larichev and Uglik, Moscow Metro Travel Guide, p. 20.
12. Valentin Berezin, Moscow Metro Photoguide (Planeta, 1989), p. 38.
13. Larichev and Uglik, Moscow Metro Travel Guide, pp. 66–7.
14. Abakumov, Moscow Subway, p. 20.
15. According to Andreas Trier Mørch and Juri Nikitin, The Unknown St Petersburg: Architecture from 1917 to 1956 (Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, 2003), p. 98.
16. In fact, it was dictated by military spending. In his memoirs, Khrushchev notes with some regret: ‘When I was the leader of the Party and the government, I decided that we had to economise drastically in the building of houses, the construction of communal services, and even in the development of agriculture in order to build up our defences. I even suspended the construction of subways in Kiev, Baku and Tbilisi so that we could redirect these funds into strengthening our defences and attack forces.’ Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, p. 545.
17. Tamara Deutscher, ‘Introduction’ to Isaac Deutscher, Lenin’s Childhood (Oxford University Press, 1970).
18. Kost’ Kozlov, Kievskii Metropoliten (Varto, 2011), p. 232.
19. One of many similarly exotic mosaics in the Georgian capital – for an English-language guide (with attached postcards!), see Nini Palavandishvili, Lost Heroes of Tbilisi: Soviet Period Mosaics (GeoAIR, 2014).
20. Thanks to Otto Saumarez Smith for this description.
21. G. M. Voskresenskii, Kharkivskii Metropoliten (Prapor, 1980), p. 59.
22. A. Merkulov, Automation Serves Man (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), p. 74.
23. Ibid., p. 149.
24. Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR (Verso, 1989), p. 53.
25. However, Warsaw does have several overground stations built between 1958 and 1974 in a highly stylish concrete-Expressionist style. In his edited collection on their designers, AR/PS: The Architecture of Arseniusz Romanowicz and Piotr Szymaniak (Centrum Architektury, 2013), Grzegorz Piątek points out that their avoidance of any hint of architecture parlante makes them very unlike both the Moscow Metro or the currently popular symbolic train stations of Santiago Calatrava. There is also, full disclosure, an essay by the author on the stations in the book.
26. Edwin Heathcote, Budapest: A Guide to Twentieth-Century Architecture (Ellipsis, 1997), p. 228.
27. Ctibor Rybár, Prague (Olympia, 1979), p. 51.
28. Radomira Sedláková, The Prague Metro (Futurista Universum, 2010), p. 15.
29. Who is interviewed (in English) in Jerzy S. Majewski, Landmarks of People’s Poland in Warsaw: A Book of Walks (Gazeta, 2011), pp. 246–9. The (identical) 1983 drawings of the 1995 stations can be found in T. Przemysław Szafer, Contemporary Architecture in Poland (Arkady, 1983), p. 32.
30. On Bojović and Energoprojekt, see Dubravka Sekulić, Three Points of Support (Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013).
31. That’s at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga_Metro.
32. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Pelican Books, 1978), pp. 250–51. The statistics are from 1935 – the very year the Metro’s first line opened to its appallingly housed public.
33. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, p. 90.
34. Larichev and Uglik, Moscow Metro Travel Guide, p. 24.
1. Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie and Other Work (CB Editions, 2009), p. 28.
2. Simon Jenkins, ‘The architect’s ego is reconstructed as Moscow’s Mayor asserts the lay view’, Guardian, 27 April 2007. ‘A stylistic self-confidence not seen in European cities since Victorian Britain … it is London, not Moscow, that has sold out architecturally to money and vulgarity.’
3. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003), p. 33.
4. The fact that a few houses in the old town were being rebuilt already before the full Stalinist takeover is both true and fundamentally irrelevant – the decision to reconstruct the entire historic city was a governmental one, and heavily contested by Modernists, some of whom emigrated as a result.
5. Marta Leśniakowska, Architecture of Warsaw (Arkada, 2006), pp. 73–4.
6. This is, it should be noted, not necessarily a consequence of post-1989 neglect – there is a late-1950s film from the Polish ‘black wave’ of critical documentaries which depicts the Old Town of Lublin in exactly this light.
7. Zygmunt M. Stępiński, ‘In the Light of Our Experience’, Architektura, July–August 1978, p. 36.
8. Pierluigi Cervellati, ‘Innovation or Conservation?’, Architektura, July–August 1978, p. 80.
9. Ibid., p. 80.
10. Ibid., p. 74.
11. Architektura, January 1980, p. 77.
12. Ibid., p. 53.
13. ‘The rise in productivity due to the industrialisation of building techniques, which at first sight looks so significant, on closer inspection proves to be largely self-deception. Even today, in Thuringia, for example, traditional stone building can still be cheaper, even for a fairly large construction, than the same building in the hallowed style of prefabrication, and this is instructive, as the tricks of financial cost accounting are far more disturbing on the macro scale than on the micro.’ Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (New Left Books, 1978), p. 433. A similar point on the dominance of concrete in Soviet-era Estonia, a country abundant in high-quality wood, can be found in Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture (Reaktion, 2012).
14. Florian Urban, ‘The Invention of the Historic City: Building the Past in East Berlin 1970–1990’, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, p. 204. The thesis can be accessed at http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2006/1204/.
15. Ibid., pp. 322–3. Urban notes that ‘since [the Nikolaiviertel] does not claim authenticity, it leaves space for the imagination’, p. 324.
16. Janis Krastins and Ivars Strantmanis, Riga: The Complete Guide to Architecture (ADD, 2004), p. 212.
17. Ibid., p. 219.
18. For a bestiary of sham replicas, see Clementine Cecil and Edward Harris (eds.), Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point (MAPS, 2007), pp. 78–81.
19. These, the first ‘social housing’ projects here since the 1920s, given that the housing projects of the USSR were (mostly) not aimed at a particular social class, are profiled in English in Karin Hallas-Murula, Tallinn Architecture 1900–2010 (Museum of Estonian Architecture, 2010), p. 122. Typically for Estonia the architecture is quite pleasant, in its good-taste way.
20. Brzeska, the 64-year-old founder of the Warsaw Tenants’ Association, was found dead in 2011 in the forests outside Warsaw, her body burnt. There is an account in English at http://libcom.org/news/housing-activist-found-dead-warsaw-08032011. Pensioners are often the victims of the privatization of communist-era housing, which they are usually informed of after the fact.
21. ‘… and just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scenes of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 10.
1. György Konrád, The City Builder (Dalkey Archive, 2007), p. 123.
2. This is A. J. P. Taylor, a sceptical aside on Isaac Deutscher’s Marxist ‘hocus pocus’, see ‘Trotsky’ in Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 175.
3. These figures are somewhat outside the purview of a book about things that still exist, but for ‘Movement’ and similar Soviet kinetic artist-architects, see Jane A. Sharp, ‘The Personal Visions and Public Spaces of the Movement Group (Dvizhenie)’, in David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (eds.), Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (V&A, 2008), pp. 234–41; and on Hansen and other more experimental architects of the post-war era in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, see Łukasz Stanek, Team 10 East (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesni, 2014).
4. Miklós Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker’s State (Pelican Books, 1977), pp. 141–2.
5. See Rem Koolhaas’s 2006 film Lagos – Wide and Close. For a critique of this irksome ideology see Matthew Gandy, ‘Learning From Lagos’, New Left Review, vol. 33, May–June 2005, or by implication Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006).
6. There is a website with an informative essay on the kiosks and photographs of them in various permutations – including being used as bus stops in Belarus – available at http://www.publicplan-architects.com/k67/k67_kiosk_project_information.html.
7. Rusudan Mirzikashvili, ‘Everybody’s Favourite’, in Dietmar Steiner et al. (eds.), Soviet Modernism (AzW, 2011), p. 156. Conversely, for an optimistic take on these self-built extensions as ‘the architecture of the future’, see Joanna Warsza, Bouillon Group et al, Kamikaze Loggia (Georgian Ministry of Culture, 2013); and also Levan Asabashvili’s essays on housing networks and the collapse of Georgia’s infrastructure in Joanna Warsza (ed.), Ministry of Highways: A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi (Sternberg Press, 2014).
8. For a sympathetic critique of the Baugruppen, see Adrian Jones and Chris Matthews’s post at their blog Jones the Planner: http://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/2014/05/berlin-baugruppen-mental-walls.html.
9. See Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books, 2014), p. 75.
10. For an English-language history of FV, the umbrella group behind this scene, and their role in Metelkova, see Nikolai Jeffs, ‘FV and the “Third Scene” ’, in Lilijana Stepančič (ed.), FV: Alternative Scene of the Eighties (Mednarodni grafični likovni center, 2008). He concludes that for these groups ‘the issue was not socialism or capitalism, but rather the possibility of developing a cultural production – and above all a society – that would transcend both forms.’
11. Markus Bader, Oliver Baurhenn, Kuba Szreder, Raluca Voinea and Katharina Koch (eds.), The Knot: An Experiment on Collaborative Art in Public Urban Space (Jovis, 2011).
12. Tristan Sechrest interviewing Sierakowski for Open Democracy, at https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/slawomir-sierakowski-tristan-sechrest/put-vaclav-havel-in-any-election-today-and-he-would-lose.
13. Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948–1974 (University of California Press, 1978), pp. 68–71.
14. Roy Moore, Self Management in Yugoslavia (Fabian Society, 1970), p. 11.
15. Ibid., p. 8.
16. Milojko Drulović, Self-Management on Trial (Spokesman Books, 1978).
17. Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracing the Break-up 1980–92 (Verso, 1993), p. 97.
18. Ibid., p. 133.
19. Vladimir Kulić, Maroje Mrduljaš and Wolfgang Thaler, Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (Jovis, 2012), pp. 124–5.
20. Dubravka Sekulić, Glozt nicht so Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2013), p. 20.
21. There were many forms of self-management. ‘The entire collective’, i.e. all the employees in a given BOAL, were ‘obliged to meet five or six times a year’ by law, but this often degenerated into a mere rubber stamp. More ambitious workplaces were more devolved at plant level, with for instance work groups of thirty people meeting and then voting. Either way, the system was open to, in the parlance, ‘distortions’. Drulović, Self-Management on Trial, p. 63.
22. There was actually a programme of ‘council housing’ in Belgrade by the 1970s, largely to fill this gap: ‘Acting on the solidarity principle,’ writes Drulović, ‘Belgrade undertook a drive to build flats for persons employed in enterprises which cannot set aside any resources for that purpose. Financed by city funds, with the help of credits from banks and the contributions of work organisations of up to one third of the cost, 2,000 such flats have been constructed so far, and a further 10,000 should be completed over the next five years.’ This could perhaps have alleviated the problem at least to a degree, had the IMF not stepped in. Ibid., p. 116.
23. Sekulić, Glozt nicht so Romantisch!, p. 50. The architects STEALTH. unlimited, in their work on Kaluderica, ask whether it’s ‘the top or the bottom of the philosophy and practice of self-management’, in Simona Vidmar (ed.), Unfinished Modernisations: Between Utopia and Pragmatism (Umetnostna Galerija Maribor, 2012), p. 39.
24. Vidmar (ed.), Unfinished Modernisations, p. 39.
1. Octavio Paz, ‘The Other Mexico’, in The Labyrinth of Solitude (Penguin, 2005), p. 229
2. Quoted in Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower (Thames and Hudson, 2009), p. 90.
3. There are penetrating studies of all of these and others in Gwendolyn Leick’s Tombs of the Great Leaders (Reaktion, 2014).
4. Quoted in Patrick Hyder Patterson, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 299.
5. A probably more symptomatic museum in this respect is the Belgrade War Museum, built into the Kalmegadan fortress. Its exhibits and dioramas about the wars on this territory from ancient times to the 1990s feature everything from abstract sculptures to heroic bronzes of Tito and an executed Partisan, with nearly all of it ending in 1945. The only post-Yugoslav exhibit is a small series of maps of the ‘NATO aggression’ of 1999, showing whence and how Belgrade was attacked. There is nothing, however, on the wars that preceded it throughout the 1990s, following the fictional official line that the Serbian government had nothing to do with the war in Bosnia, or the wave of atrocities perpetuated by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries.
6. Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (1927), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1 (Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 36.
7. Dubravka Ugrešić, Nobody’s Home (Telegram, 2007), p. 54: ‘Why, they are the bulwark and the crossroads! Croatia has always envisoned itself as a bulwark. For a while, Croatia was the bulwark against the Turks (who would have taken Vienna were it not for the Croats), and then against communism (those Serbs, as everyone knows, were all communists). For Croats the word “Balkan” means “Serbian”, “Orthodox”, “the barbarian hordes”. Croatia is renowned as a crossroads as well: not only as a maritime one but also a web of railway junctions and airline routes. The bulwark and the crossroads are fantasies of the state and the nation which have been disseminated with the same melodrama of patchy argumentation everywhere, particularly when one heads in an easterly direction from Croatia. Bosnia, too, is a bulwark and a crossroads, and Serbia is too, of course. And don’t forget Macedonia. A friend of mine who often travels to the southern states of the former Soviet Union has come across notions of the bulwark and the crossroads identical in every detail, cultivated by Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Uzbeks, the Turkmens, the Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Buryats.’
8. See Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2015).
9. On this, see the introduction to Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001), or E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1 (Pelican Books, 1971), pp. 295–312.
10. See Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books, 2014), p. 75.
11. This forms the subject of a short, apparently neutral, politically pointed film by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi, which shows construction workers at work dismantling the representation of ‘the workers’, available online at http://www.mykolaridnyi.com/works/monument-platforms.
12. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Barbarism with a Human Face: Lenin v Stalin in Ukraine’, London Review of Books, 8 May 2014, essentially argues that it should have been eastern/southern Ukraine’s ‘anti-Maidan’ tearing down Lenin’s statues, given his role in ensuring ‘Novorossiya’ was part of a sovereign Ukraine.
13. For an account of this, see Agata Pyzik, ‘Why Soviet Monuments Should be Protected’, Guardian, 29 September 2014. I can attest her inbox at the time included outraged claims that Lenin ‘killed millions’ and that the Soviets killed ‘140%’ of Ukrainians, among other highlights. Probably the most sensible and historically astute response to the Leninoclasm was in Zaporozhia, where the giant Lenin was simply dressed in Ukrainian national costume.
14. Reproduced in Alexei Tarkhanov and Sergei Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture (Lawrence King, 1992), p. 11.
15. The actor who plays Lenin in Eisenstein’s film was denounced in the avant-garde magazine New LEF as resembling ‘a statue of Lenin’. See Viktor Shklovsky and Osip Brik, ‘The ‘Lef’ Arena’, in Screen, Winter 1971/2.
16. For the interested, these two survivors are in Gorki Leninskiye just outside Moscow, and in Lenin’s hometown, Simbirsk, still known by its Soviet name, Ulyanovsk. The English-language guide to the Central Lenin Museum (Raduga Publishers, 1986) lists a ridiculous number of Lenin museums in the Soviet Union and its satellites, dozens and dozens of them from Ulan Bator to Bucharest to Zakopane. It also lists several in the West, of which the one in Tampere, Finland, survives at the time of writing.
17. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (Pelican Books, 1971), pp. 75–6.
18. The useful comparison here is to the Racławice Panorama in Wrocław. This intriguing folk-Brutalist rotunda in the city centre was designed in 1967 to rehouse a late-nineteenth-century panoramic painting originally on display in Lviv, depicting the great Polish radical general Tadeusz Kościuszko’s (sadly pyrrhic) victory over Tsarist forces at the battle of Racławice in 1794. Though clearly for any Marxist the Englightenment-inspired democrat Kościuszko had ‘progress’ on his side in the war with Russian absolutism, any depiction of a victory over Russia was considered too politically risky; the panorama was only opened to the public in 1985, nearly twenty years after the building was designed. Still, in its Pavlovian lighting effects, pomp and solemnity combined with a localized Modernism, the building is very Soviet.
19. Cf. Jerzy Wilmanski, Łódź: Miasto i Ludzie (Wydawnictwo Łódźie, 1977), p. 71.
20. Usefully, Wikipedia has a chart of the various estimates from Western historians of the Soviet dead. The very lowest estimate is John Keegan’s 14 million, of whom half were civilians; while historians who can hardly be accused of Soviet sympathies, such as Norman Davies and Tony Judt, give far higher calculations, of 28 million and 24 million, respectively, with civilians a majority in both. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Estimates_of_Soviet_war_dead_by_Western_scholars.
21. Richard J. Evans, review of Roger Moorhouse’s The Devil’s Alliance, Guardian, 6 August 2014.
22. This claim, regurgitated from Stéphane Courtois’s The Black Book of Communism, is a historical nonsense. What it does is take all deaths that happened under ‘communist’ rule from 1917 to 1991 – from murder, famine, war – and ascribe them to ‘communism’. Most of Stalin’s victims were killed by the famine of 1932–3, for which Stalin and his regime are undoubtedly culpable, but in much the same way that any government in an industrialized country is culpable for famine – which they have been, often, as extensively demonstrated in Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (Verso, 2000). Following Courtois’s logic and adding the deaths in Europe during the Second World War, for the outbreak of which Nazism was solely responsible, the deaths from Stalinism are vastly outnumbered. This is in no way to excuse Stalin, who would otherwise have been by far the most murderous European leader of the twentieth century, but there is a reason why the Soviets were chosen as the ‘lesser evil’ to the Nazis – because they were. In Poland, for instance, victim of both the two ‘totalitarianisms’, the experience is not comparable. Even given crimes such as mass deportations and the Katyn massacre, or the forcible imposition of a Soviet-dominated government, the Nazis’ systematic destruction of hundreds of Polish villages, several cities and their inhabitants sits strangely with the Soviets’ bankrolling and aiding of their subsequent reconstruction. In fact, more Poles were killed in the war by Ukrainian nationalists than by the Soviets, which would perhaps be better remembered if it had been Ukraine that imposed an unpopular government on Poland for forty-five years.
23. The differences between the two events are blindingly obvious – in 1921, the Bolsheviks called upon countries which only months before had been at war with them to send aid; in 1933, Stalinists refused even to publicly acknowledge that the famine was happening, let alone ask for relief. Both famines, incidentally, occurred in southern Russia as well as in Ukraine. For a good, and conspiracy-theory-free, account of exactly how the mass murder of the famine of 1933 came to happen, see R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger and S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932–33’, in Christopher Read (ed.), The Stalin Years: A Reader (Palgrave, 2003).
24. On which, see Neal Ascherson’s wonderful portrait of the various cultures to occupy the Black Sea (Vintage, 2007).
25. For a fascinating account of this removal and the events around it, see the Estonian artist Kristina Norman’s book project After-War (Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009), which charts how the bronze soldier became an informal gathering point for the city’s alienated, working-class Russian-speaking youth, and argues that there were good reasons why they took its removal as a direct attack on them. She claims that the monument was actually in the process of being domesticated and made informal by the Russian teenagers who congregated there to drink and lay flowers, and that its removal was determined by intra-Estonian political power plays.
26. The original design can be found (with English translation) in Alexandra Kusá, Prerušená pieseň: Umenie Socialistického Realizmu 1948–1956 (SNG, 2012), p. 94.
27. Gavin Stamp, The Memorial for the Missing of the Somme (Profile, 2006), p. 84.
28. Vladimir Olshansky and Alla Filatova, Memorial Nad Dneprom (Kiev Misteshtvo, 1987); thanks to Oleksiy for the gift. The reader should bear in mind, however, that given the pace of change in Kiev at the time of writing, the museum may not remain in this form by the time of this book’s publication. Who controls the present controls the past …
29. The mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war is extensively discussed in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Bodley Head, 2010), pp. 175–82.
30. In English, one powerful account is that of the Bundist and later Solidarity supporter Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights (Bookmarks, 1943).
31. This gesture is remembered by another plinth elsewhere on the square, but it’s not quite what it seems. Brandt, as a member of the anti-Nazi underground and a socialist activist, had nothing to apologize for, unlike most of West Germany’s industrial magnates. He was atoning where they wouldn’t or couldn’t.
32. To give some sense of the narrative this is placed uneasily into, the book from which I obtained the name of the artists is Tadeusz Czapliński and Jerzy Launer, Places of National Memory in Łódź: Martyrdom and Fight, 1939–1945 (Łódźie Zakl, 1974). In what sense were these innocent, helpless victims ‘martyrs’ or ‘fighters’?
33. This information is courtesy of an English-language guide for sale at the visitor centre: Maria Wisnioch, Majdanek: Guide to the Historical Buildings (Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2012).
34. See Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (University of California Press, 2008), among other things a useful corrective to Timothy Snyder’s disgraceful treatment of the Partisans as mere provocateurs of the Germans in Bloodlands.
35. I owe this information to Oleksiy Radynski – see his essay on the subject, ‘Scientifically Justified Artistic Consciousness: Artists and Architects in Late Soviet Ukraine’, in Steiner et al. (eds.), Soviet Modernism (AzW, 2011).
36. See Pyzik, Poor but Sexy, p. 68.
37. Quotes from Ákos Eleőd are in the brochure Statue Park: Gigantic Monuments from the Age of Communist Dictatorship (Akos Rethly, 1995), unpaginated.
38. For a work that does, you need to turn to the greater possible complexity of film, not the univocality of monumental sculpture – see Juris Podnieks’s elegiac, haunting 1980 documentary Constellation of Riflemen, which interviewed many of the survivors of both the war and the purge.
39. Valters Nollendorfs, Dzintra Bungs, Gundega Michele and Uldis Neibergs, The Three Occupations of Latvia: Soviet and Nazi Takeovers and Their Consequences (OMB, 2012), p. 28.
40. Attempting to explain this in the dying days of the USSR to the readers of Izvestia, then full of complaints about ‘out-of-towners’ moving to Moscow, Otto Latsis said: ‘I invite Muscovites to imagine for a moment that “out of towners” [become] the majority population, and that Russian is heard less and less; that spokesmen have appeared amongst them who lay claim to these areas and even claim them as their own national property. This is how it is in Riga now.’ Translated into English as ‘Farewell to the Communist Party in Latvia’, New Left Review, no. 182, July–August 1990, p. 157. An informed, unsentimental account of Baltic history can be found in Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolutions (Yale, 1994).
41. Latsis, ‘Farewell to the Communist Party in Latvia’, p. 158.
42. Paul Goble, ‘The Growing Importance of Latvia’s Occupation Museum’ (Museum of Occupations, 2013), unpaginated leaflet.
43. Norman, After-War, p. 18.
44. Quoted in After-War, p. 70. This is not an exclusively non-Russian phenomenon – far from it. Boris Groys writes that ‘Since class interests, along with Marxism, have vanished from the sights of current historiography, there are no “real” protagonists of history left beside the nations. Accordingly, it has now become characteristic for recent historical commentary on formerly communist-dominated East European countries to view communism as simply an ideological façade for Russian imperialism. Even if such an interpretation might seem corroborated by numerous facts, it should not be forgotten that in Russia itself the suppression of the Russian national identity was prosecuted not less but more forcefully by the apparatus of communist ideology. Besides the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian philosophical tradition, and its historiography and literature from pre-Revolutionary eras were also largely banned or rigorously censored. So it is hardly surprising that the dismantling of the communist regime in the early 1990s was accompanied and spurred on by cries on the streets for “Russia! Russia!” In that period the anti-communist revolution in Russia was waged as a fight for national liberation – as a campaign to emancipate Russia from the grip of the Soviet Union and liberate it from the dictatorship of Soviet authorities. The civil war between the Reds and the Whites that first spawned the creation of the Soviet Union had been a war between the communist “International” and the nationalist “Russia”: back then, the “International” won. But in the 1980s and 1990s, “Russia” got its revenge. For Russian nationalists today, anything connected with communism is automatically the work of others: Jews, Latvians, Georgians and so on. That, of course, does not mean that Russian nationalists take no pride in the achievements of the Soviet state during the communist era – except that these achievements are ascribed solely to the capacity of the Russian people to remain creative, resilient and victorious in the face of the ruinous communist dictatorship. Anything “good” that arose in the Soviet era is thus ascribed to the Russian nation’s cultural identity; anything “bad” is seen as resulting from the anti-national project of communism.’ Boris Groys, ‘The Postcommunist Situation’, in Ljubomir Micic, Frank Castorf and Haralampi G. Oroschakov (eds.), Nach Moskau! Nach Moskau! (Volksbühne, 2010), pp. 171–2.
45. This is broadly true, but not exclusively – see Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbours, on the Polish-assisted pogrom in Jedwabne, 1941. In this book Gross has many interesting things to say on the persistent Żydokomuna myth, arguing that those who perpetrated the pogroms were equally likely to co-operate with any occupation, and did so with the new one in 1945.
46. However grim Poland in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was, to compare it either with the Nazi occupation or even the Stalinist years of 1948–53 is not serious. But this comparison did have a political use – Kotkin and Gross note that Poland’s unusually extensive opposition ‘was possible only because the opposition had come to reject the idea of reform (“socialism with a human face”) and instead to see the system as “totalitarian”. At the same time, the Communist system they were challenging was the least totalitarian country in the bloc, with non-Communist values, public spaces, and even institutions.’ Stephen Kotkin and Jan Tomasz Gross, Uncivil Society (Modern Library, 2010), p. 102. Yet official memory has enshrined the total equivalence of all these ‘crimes against the Polish nation’, with regular searches for reds under the bed. For a prescient account of the ‘paranoid style’ in Polish politics, see Andrzej Walicki, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Communist Pluralism’, New Left Review, no. 185, January–February 1991. As if unable to cope with the fact that the Party had begun the process of its own dissolution – surely impossible for a ‘totalitarian’ force – conspiratorial explanations had to be sought.
47. For an account of the results, see David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity (Cornell University Press, 2005), quite the best book published on the post-Soviet working class in English, one which for once gives due attention to ideological factors in the apparent paradoxes of Eastern Europe’s rightward shift.
48. The major text on this is Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (Pluto Press, 1975), pp. 43–64. This is vindicated and expanded upon in his later trawl through the newly opened archives, The Soviet Century (Verso, 2005).
49. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (Progress, 1979), p. 71.
1. Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 89–90.
2. Ticktin, for instance, appears to argue that workers’ self-management could have solved the Soviet economic crisis, as if an equally intense crisis had not already destroyed workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia at exactly the same time.
3. Keti Chukhrov, ‘Sexuality in a Non-Libidinal Economy’, E-Flux Journal, no. 54, April 2014.
4. For a justification of this view, see Yuezhi Zhao, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in China’, Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 5, October 2012.
5. In fairness, Groys’s suggestiveness and originality is sometimes more interesting than mere ‘facts’, and seldom more so than in this bizarre, ultra-abstract neo-Stalinist tract. He writes of China that ‘Marxists have always believed that capitalism represents the best mechanism for economic acceleration. Marx frequently emphasised this, and employed it as an argument against “utopian communism”. The proposal to tame capitalism, to instrumentalise it, to set it to work under the control of the Communist Party for communist victory – this had been on the agenda from the October revolution on … However, the idea had never been finally translated into action because the communist leadership had never felt secure enough, and feared losing power through this experiment. In the 1980s and 90s, it felt strong enough, and risked the experiment. It is still too soon to judge whether this experiment has failed. In China, the Communist Party is still firmly in control … the model will be tested further – and may yet prove entirely successful.’ Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript (Verso, 2009), p. 118.
6. Meanwhile, for an intriguing if outrageously historically lofty argument that China is not now and has never been capitalist, see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso, 2006).
7. That’s more than double the rate for the country as a whole – see Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (Penguin Books, 2012), p. 155, which quotes the local Party secretary: ‘if you want to discuss who adheres most to socialism, wouldn’t it be Shanghai?’ This is of course ‘socialism’ in the Kaganovich definition. For an analysis of what this total state ownership of land and widespread state ownership of business means for the proletariat, see Julia Lovell’s book on urban development and Western architects, where she notes that ‘according to China’s land management law, the state can requisition any land when it is in the “public interest”; the vagueness of this concept has led to widespread land-grabs that turn social housing and farmland into profitable commercial housing complexes, golf courses and amusement parks.’ She notes with some bafflement that campaigners against this tend to invoke Chairman Mao in their defence. Julia Lovell, Splendidly Fantastic: Architecture and Power Games in China (Strelka, 2011), p. 48.
8. On this last, a typically Maoist combination of self-activity, mass participation and rampant, dogmatic authoritarianism, see Elizabeth Perry and Xun Li, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Westview Press, 1997).
9. An English-language account of the Chinese New Left can be found in Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution (Verso, 2009).
10. See Mao Zedong, On Practice and Contradiction, introduced by Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2007).
11. The best English-language account and description is the former cybertheory guru and ‘neo-reactionary’ Nick Land’s dizzy combination of advertorial and historical melodrama, in his Shanghai Expo Guide 2010 (Urbanatomy, 2010).