Radical changes in taste and historical estimation are common in architecture. Nearly every style and era has been reviled at one time or another: the architects of the Italian Renaissance loathed the medieval cathedrals of France and northern Italy; the English Neo-Gothics disliked the Renaissance in turn, and detested 18th-century British and Irish neoclassicism; the modernists admired the Georgians but despised the eclectic mash-up of the later 19th century; their hatred was returned in abundance by the historical pick-n-mix of 1980s postmodernism, which itself became desperately unfashionable in the 21st century. Arguably no architecture, however, has undergone so spectacular a reversal of status as that of the Soviet Union and the state socialist countries. Charles Jencks’s mid-1980s verdict on the modernist cities of the ussr and Eastern Europe—a series of ‘vertical concentration camps’—was obscenely worded (this in a region that has seen many actual concentration camps), but it was in no way atypical in spirit.footnote1 In the early 1990s, it was a commonplace that ‘actually existing socialism’ had bequeathed a scarred landscape of pompous public buildings, crumbling concrete infrastructure and vast, soulless prefabricated housing estates.
Yet today these buildings are among the most discussed, reproduced and visited landmarks of modern architecture. There have been numerous rehabilitation projects: mass housing has been attractively renovated in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia with eu funds, and cultural and government buildings have been repaired and reopened to considerable fanfare, from the audacious former Ministry of Highways in Tbilisi to Bratislava’s classical-Brutalist Slovak National Gallery. Sometimes this produces historical ironies, as old symbols become backdrops to alien functions. The renovation of the Pressecafé on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin involved the meticulous uncovering and restoration of a bright socialist mural. Several buildings have been transformed into tourist attractions, such as Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture, a former cinema turned art space in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Kyiv River Port, a complex full of richly propagandistic mosaics which had become a popular hipster bar and arcade before the Russian invasion in 2022, seemingly immune to the state campaign against Soviet iconography after the Maidan Uprising of 2013–14. Airbnb hosts have got in on the boom, with scores of flats marketed as ‘socialist chic’. tv shows such as hbo’s Chernobyl (2019) fetishize the surfaces of the system they condemn, luxuriating in brown carpets, marble walls, orange plastic light fittings and, of course, prefabricated concrete structures.
Nonetheless, many buildings—especially housing, and especially in the former ussr—still languish in dilapidation and decline. The vogue for this architecture is much more evident in the media—including social media—and in publishing, where there has been a spate of books on the subject. Here, the focus is not on the mandatory neoclassicism of the Stalinist era—sometimes lush, sometimes lumbering—but on modern architecture, from the 1956 ‘secret speech’ until the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the recent books attempts to coin a shorthand rubric: ‘Socmodernism’, a spin on ‘Socrealism’, the portmanteau for Socialist Realism, the warped neoclassicism that was the only permitted aesthetic from roughly 1932 in the ussr and 1948 elsewhere, until Khrushchev condemned Stalinist opulence in 1954.
Notably, the rise of ‘socmodernist’ architecture to retro-cultural prominence has largely taken place via photography rather than written history. The majority of the new titles are photobooks, many of which began as Instagram accounts. Three publishers specialize almost exclusively in such books: Zupagrafika, an Anglo-Polish press, which produces glossy guides to mass housing in the former Soviet republics; bacu, a Romanian publisher responsible for impressively comprehensive but text-light large-format photobooks on nearly all countries in the region (Socialist Modernism in Romania and Moldova, Socialist Modernism in Ukraine, Socialist Modernism in East Germany, and so forth); and fuel, a London-based press which made its name in the genre with Christopher Herwig’s Soviet Bus Stops—a two-volume photographic anthology of mostly rural modernist bus shelters, some oblique, some futuristic, which was followed by a documentary. One of fuel’s most recent titles is Dmytro Soloviov’s Ukrainian Modernism, a survey of mostly post-1956 public buildings, some of which have been damaged or destroyed since 2022.footnote2
Photography preceding history has meant that the photographers have often got the history wrong, if they allude to it at all. Coffee table books tend not to historicize or even contextualize the monuments they sumptuously present. The history is especially sketchy in Frédéric Chaubin’s bestseller cccp : Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed (2017), and in Jan Kempenaers’s Spomenik (2010) it is removed altogether, creating a series of baffling abstracts out of unidentified partisan memorials in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Several new architectural histories have tried to introduce some much-needed analysis and context into this proliferation of images, a task to which they take a variety of approaches. The publisher that has done the most to historicize these modish concrete hulks is dom, a German firm run by the architects Philipp and Natascha Meuser, whose output spans the design of mass housing, public buildings and specific regions (the Baltic, the Caucasus and especially Ukraine) and biographies of prominent architects. But the agenda was set by the Vienna Centre of Architecture’s Soviet Modernism 1955–1991 (2012), which told the story of post-Stalin modernism through the non-Russian republics, arguing that the architecture of this era was far more ‘Soviet’ than it was ‘Russian’. The book also did much to complicate the hackneyed notion that these buildings were ‘totalitarian’ monoliths.footnote3 On the contrary, Soviet Modernism showed they were highly complex creations, whose architects often had a large amount of freedom within the system, certainly compared with artists, filmmakers and writers. And rather than being dictated from the top, architectural policy was frequently the product of local fiefdoms in the capitals of the Soviet republics, with Moscow’s (apparently, authoritarian and conservative) tastes especially irrelevant in the Baltic and the Caucasus.
What follows is an appraisal of recent attempts to ground and interpret this photogenic architecture, which range from monographs on the ‘socialist modernist’ city of Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, to comparative case studies of particular buildings—opera houses in two non-Russian republics, Belarus and Lithuania—to books on applied art and illustrated in-depth studies of Ukraine’s mass housing. Through considering these diverse historical works together, it should be possible to establish what exactly makes this architecture so appealing to the 21st century, but also, more importantly, to clarify what it was in the first place—how it got built, by whom and for whom—and so to approach a question rarely if ever broached directly by architectural historians of the period: to what extent, if any, beneath the now-fetishized aesthetic, it was meaningfully the product of a radically different social system to liberal capitalism.
Despite the abundance of new books, synoptic studies can be hard to find. Much existing work focuses either on the ussr alone or individual countries or regions, or on particular architects.footnote4 Socmodernism, by the Polish researchers Łukasz Galusek and Michał Wiśniewski, is billed as the first comprehensive, single-volume account of architecture built in the Communist-governed countries of Europe between 1956 and 1991. Emerging out of a 2024–25 exhibition at the International Cultural Centre in Kraków, it is most valuable for trying to tell the entire story of ‘socialist modernism’. That story is one begun in a better book from the anti-modernist 1990s: Anders Åman’s Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (1992), which showed how, for around seven or eight intensive years from 1948 onwards, neoclassicism became the official architecture of the Warsaw Pact countries, aggressively imposed by Moscow (Yugoslavia was spared this by the Tito–Stalin split the same year). This caused problems, because most Central and Eastern European architects intended to carry on as they had before the war. The majority of practising designers, especially those under forty, were modernists, committed to the aesthetics of the Bauhaus and the planning ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, in which Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Polish architects were highly prominent. But beginning in the early 1930s, the ussr had been developing a bombastic neoclassical manner, enlivened by applied propaganda art. In the three years after the war before it became compulsory, some construction did take place, most of it clearly aligned with the socialist programme, such as the neo-Constructivist Collective House in Litvinov, Czechoslovakia, the elegant glassy mémosz trade union headquarters in the centre of Budapest, and the simple, low-rise, wide-balconied housing blocks that constituted the first part of East Berlin’s Stalinallee. But from 1948 the modern architects of the region—many of whom had close ties to the local Communist or socialist parties—were put under enormous pressure to adopt neoclassicism, and the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a huge amount of building in the neoclassical mould, not least in the reconstruction of the centres of Warsaw, Berlin and Sofia, and the construction of new industrial towns such as Eisenhüttenstadt (Stalinstadt), Dunaújváros (Sztálinváros), Nowa Huta, Ostrava-Poruba and Dimitrovgrad.