The Making of a Few Mistakes

Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings
by Owen Hatherley
Allen Lane, 2015, 624 pages, $49.99

Owen Hatherley’s fascinating, if frequently wrong-headed, Landscapes of Communism is a blend of sermon, history and travelogue wrapped into an interpretation of the architecture of communist rule. The best way to approach it is through its antechamber, Hatherley’s Militant Modernism (2008), a snappy paean to modernism. That Zero Books, the publisher of Militant Modernism, included a page proudly distancing itself from the “cretinous anti-intellectualism” and “banal conformity” of “late capitalism”—the last a term that is pose, not description—gives a suggestion of what to expect. But credit where credit is due: the fact that my copy is disintegrating after only one reading is a nice touch. When hymning the praises of an architectural style so prone to dereliction, a poorly-made paperback is not a bad place to do it.

Like its rambling, much longer successor, Militant Modernism veers off in unexpected twists and turns that would have made the duller modernists frown, but, politically, it cleaves to the old (party) line. There “is always the possibility of another outcome, where [today’s] system based on destruction, injustice and barbarism can finally be given its long overdue burial. The dormant Socialist Modernism can, if nothing else, offer spectral blueprints for such a future.”

Born in 1981, shortly before history was supposed to have ended, Hatherley can, despite occasional lapses into undergraduate polemics, be a playful and entertaining writer. A propagandist, yes, but he’s erudite and sharp too, aware of the ironies of, well, late communism and ready to acknowledge some of the failures (and far, far worse) that went before.

A “red diaper” baby and grandbaby (to borrow the American phrase: his parents belonged to Militant Tendency, a peculiarly nasty offshoot of the British Left; his grandparents were members of the Communist Party), he clings to the millenarian faith of his forebears, now metastasised into something more hip in this age of “” (oh, the longing in that adjective) capital. In Militant Modernism, Hatherley laments the disdain with which Britain’s brutalist architecture is treated, but finds some consolation in the thought that it is dormant, not destroyed, “ready to be recharged and reactivated. This rough beast might still slouch towards a concrete New Jerusalem.”

His fervour has not cooled in the years since he wrote that. In Landscapes of Communism, Hatherley describes the museum in Moscow dedicated to the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, a shrine that plainly delights him. He notes that it is the only “revolutionary memorial” he has come across that argues that “revolution might be a rather exciting thing, one that would transform the world … for the better. Worth doing. Why not try it.” Sadly, the excitement proved too much for Mayakovsky. Unhappy with the way things were going in the Soviet Union, he shot himself in 1930.

Then again, Hatherley explains that his book “uses the term ‘communism’ as a matter of convenience”. He does not “consider that [the] societies [of the old ‘socialist camp’] fit the description in any meaningful sense”. Ah yes, the old it-hasn’t-been-tried-yet, a stale, unconvincing excuse insufficient to overcome the objection that the only credible route to “real” communism, an ideology that rejects almost everything that we understand about our species, has to be that “boot stamping on a human face—forever”.

That’s not how Hatherley sees it. He has little time for schadenfreudians (such as me) who enjoy visiting the relics of Soviet empire (“counter-revolutionary tourism”, he calls it, not entirely inaccurately). The remnants of what he clearly views as a noble, if profoundly flawed, experiment should be regarded with more respect. That’s not to claim he won’t concede that, as the non-admission goes, “mistakes were made”, big and small. Contemplating the dacha settlements scattered across the Russian countryside, he observes how, “like many Soviet ideas, it is so obviously right and so obviously botched”. So obviously right.

Landscapes of Communism is based on what Hatherley saw, “reading history through buildings”, while wandering with his Polish girlfriend, the writer Agata Pyzik, around the cities of the old empire (Warsaw, where he lives some of the time, Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Prague, Riga, Tbilisi, the former East Berlin and many more), but it reveals two distinct “landscapes”, not one. The first is exterior, the cityscapes that communism left behind. The second, in some ways more interesting, is interior, a glimpse of the mind of a true believer constructing a narrative that allows his faith to survive the facts that should have consigned it to, as the saying goes, the dustbin of history. When prophecy fails, it rarely makes much of a difference: Marxist or Millerite, believers will keep on believing, and reality will count for very little.

Thus Hatherley, no exception, asserts that the sculptors who once designed “glowering Lenins and muscle-bound workers now devote their talents” to Soviet-style representations of the likes of “Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera” and Jozef Pilsudski, Miklos Horthy and Karlis Ulmanis, the dominant figures in pre-war Poland, Hungary and Latvia respectively. “None of them [were] ‘democrats’ in any sane sense of the word”, writes the author who refers in another passage to “an experiment in radical democracy” in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

It’s a while since I was in Poland and I have never visited Ukraine, but the only statue of Ulmanis (an authoritarian, certainly, but relatively benign) that I have ever spotted in Riga, the Latvian capital, is a modest, almost jaunty effort, a bit like the one of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in Greenwich Village. Again, I may not have been looking hard enough, but the nearest thing I saw to a statue of Admiral Horthy, an infinitely more compromised figure, during a recent trip to Budapest was a smallish bust encased in protective plastic, timidly sheltering in the entry of a church.

But (possibly: there are a number of Pilsudkis in Poland and Banderas in Ukraine) exaggerating infestations of reactionary statuary is a trivial matter compared with a depiction of past and present twisted by a determination to show that a kinder, gentler communism (or something like it) is not only possible, but preferable to the “neoliberalism” (of course!) that allegedly prevails today. Thus the huzzahs for Tito’s Yugoslavia, in its heyday “one of the most admired countries in the world” apparently, a country where communist massacres were unknown (tell that to the Slovenes), and where boldly refashioned economic management was eventually brought low with the help of (naturally!) the IMF.

This perspective extends into Hatherley’s distorted—and relentlessly bleak—depiction of Eastern Europe’s more recent history, a time and a place that somehow never seems to merit the somewhat more sympathetic gaze he casts over the USSR. Transition from Moscow’s rule has been tough, brutal even, but he appears unwilling to accept that the greatest part of the blame lies with the system that created so much social and economic ruin in the first place rather than with those left to pick up the pieces after its demise.

There is a darker side still to Hatherley’s flight from truths incompatible with his dream. To be sure, he is forthright in his condemnation of many of the crimes of communist misrule, but there are denials (East Germany was “shabby, undemocratic, but hardly totalitarian”), sly evasions and telling silences too, not to speak of the tasteless jeering at the “bodycounters carrying their Black Books [of Communism]” that together hint at something more chilling at work.

And so, in a way, does Hatherley’s impatience with architecture that looks back, whether it’s the often impressionistic recreations of historic Eastern European city centres destroyed in the Second World War or the eclectic traditionalism—a precursor, maybe, of the postmodern—of high-Stalinist architecture. With characteristic cleverness, he connects the two, although the understandable urge to restore something out of so much wartime destruction ought to need no explanation. Well, perhaps it might to a writer so sympathetic to Brecht’s notion that we should “erase the traces” of the past. Those are the three words with which Hatherley begins Militant Modernism, three words all too descriptive of what the Bolsheviks set in motion in 1917.

With his devotion to the absoluteness of modernism’s breach with history, it’s no surprise that Hatherley finds so much to admire in the architecture of revolutionary Russia, put together in what he describes as “twelve years of artistic, literary and scientific ferment, a decade comparable to the Renaissance in its intensity and wide-ranging effects”, a “Renaissance” which, he omits to mention, many of Russia’s best and brightest either fled or did not survive. He does concede that “restrictions were placed on democracy, the press and freedom of assembly”. Restrictions.

A fan of Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, described by Khrushchev, a sounder judge, as “ugly as sin”, Hatherley cele­brates the unkempt geometry of this era as well as its more dreamlike constructions, both built (Moscow’s glorious Shabalovka Radio Tower) and unbuilt: Vladimir Tatlin, take a bow. This was architecture, not parlante, but hurlante, yelling the millennial moment, triumphant, all change, blood and fire in concrete and steel, the buildings of a New Jerusalem built, as utopias must be, on the bones of sinners, “former people”, those who stand in the way.

But when that millennial moment, as always, turned out not to be, Soviet architecture began to look back to something older, to styles that reflected the power structures of a steadier nation sustained by faith in a radiant future that would dawn—one day. Lenin’s mausoleum, Alexey Shchusev’s masterpiece, was a monument that, blending constructivism with echoes of “ancient, despotic ritual”, foreshadowed the horrors that lay ahead (an architect of Bray, Shchusev also designed Moscow’s spectacular Kazansky Station, a project commenced under the tsars).

Hatherley writes perceptively and well on the buildings of Stalinism, most notably Moscow’s mad high-rises, and their siblings in the colonies, in Riga, Kiev, Bucharest and Warsaw, a response to Manhattan, to be sure, but with an undeniable echo of the cathedral too: Moscow’s centre “is 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 [Sparrow] Hills.”

Inevitably, the famed Metro systems—and not just in Moscow—get their shout-out, if one that comes awkwardly from an evangelist of modernism. But so they should, their “munificence of scale”, a preview of what had been promised, “microcosms of a communist future you can walk through, smell and touch”, a slice of heaven on earth. “The Metros are,” writes Hatherley, “also exemplary spaces of the transformation of the everyday, taking two kinds of rituals—those of religion, with … sacred vaulted spaces, created atmospheres and representational icons, and the mundane daily rituals of waiting for trains [and] getting to work …”

Hatherley, no denier of the Stalinist nightmare (if unprepared to confront its deeper implications—that boot, that face—for those who would build New Jerusalem) seems more comfortable with the blander brave new world of the Khrushchev era and beyond, a landscape with less “despotic rococo” about it in all senses, a landscape more easily, if still inaccurately, described as the product of a vision that, however imperfectly realised, was rational and humane. It’s a landscape that still calls out to him with its mirage of what could never have been, a landscape of an ugliness, both literal and metaphorical, that he frequently appears to overlook.

It remains to Ms Pyzik, born during the last years of People’s Poland, and a leftist herself, to sound a note of doubt with a comment, which, to his credit, Hatherley repeats. She recalls that it was “incredibly depressing” spending her early childhood living among the modernist tower blocks of one of those Warsaw housing estates that so define our notions of the Soviet space. She would never, she said, do so again under any circumstances.

There’s a lesson there.