Warsaw Socialist realist housing blocks a dozen levels high, stuccoed to collect the pollution, butt-ugly by design —as if making the dwellings equally ugly would make their dwellers more equal— face off like the bars of ten thousand equals signs. In the colour-hungry post-war dusk every blind in the Bloc was drawn, in any kind of weather, lest someone working with them spy someone looking too happy or sad. But a few summers after the Curtain fell the occasional shirtless worker, absorbed by the fifty missing years on his timber-laminate TV, would leave the blind up, needing the breeze to…