What's really sad is how the city was rebuilt afterwards. The absolute last people you want rebuilding a grand city are Soviet engineers.
If you've never been to Poland, land in Warsaw, spend a day or two, then head south to Kraków. The amazing disparity between a city leveled in WWII and rebuilt by communists and a city untouched by the Nazis (and therefore the Soviets) is heartbreaking.
I can second the recommendation to visit Kraków - it really is gorgeous, even compared to my home town of Edinburgh.
However, if you are visiting Kraków for pleasure I can also strongly recommend a day you will not enjoy: a visit to the nearby Auschwitz and, worst of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. If you do go, I would recommend making sure you go with a guide - the one we had did an excellent job of explaining what we were seeing. One comment in particular he made I will never forget, while we were standing looking at the remains of one of the huge gas chambers he said:
"More people died in that room than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined"
A visit to the Auschwitz camp should be mandatory for all aspiring politicians. What you see and experience there changes the way you look at the world afterwards. For anyone with a soul, the words „never again” will be forever engraved in your mind.
Unfortunately, for far too many people the full text of the engraving will be "Never again will we allow good people (i.e. those who think and look like me) to suffer things like this - no matter how many evil people (i.e. those who are very different from me) we have to kill to prevent it".
It doesn't really matter that much, if your city wasn't destroyed during the war, it was destroyed during the 70's or 80's (in a process continuing to this day) when the communists governments decided to ruin every larger town in a same manner as the Americans did 20 years before them, massive tear-downs, urban freeways (right through the city center, see Prague), uniform large scale housing projects on the periphery. Admittedly, the scale was not that large, but it was the same kind of destruction.
Krakow's greater center is just gorgeous, I really loved it. But it was a similar experience, to a certain degree, as well. On a train from Katowice, the first sight was something called "Krakow Business Park", disgusting office park, a place that doesn't belong anywhere, I work in a similar project and it is almost the same. Glass blocks surrounded by an endless parking lot. Then some recent suburban development, complete clusterfuck under all circumstances. And looking from Kazimierz across Wisla, what I saw on the other bank was also very disappointing. Or this https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dO_Cw7ayCQk/Tx2LuPNmF0I/A..., seen right from the castle Wawel. And this was not built by the soviet engineers. Not much has changed after 1989. Maybe nothing at all.
The engineers were good (if not too good, it all still stands...), but they were limited by the ideology. The city planning and the architecture were at the ideology's service. For instance, rarely did buildings have ground-level spaces for commerce and services; after all, any form of entrepreneurship was discouraged by the economic system, so there was no official need for cafes at every corner. The streets were made wide to allow for easy troops transfer and make it harder for any rebels to create barricades. Some streets were shifted by a few meters to obscure a view of churches and other historic landmarks which could provoke unrighteous thinking.
I heartily recommend Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'Imperium' (it's available in English) if you want to learn more about the Soviet Union in general and different cultures inhabiting it at the time. A lot of spot-on analysis of how the system worked. Brilliant documentary writing, too.
Communist architecture followed the principles of communist architecture. Diversion from what the state thought was a good idea was highly un-recommended. The principles of communist architecture started off from a lot of high-minded platitudes about equality and national purpose, but in practice always translated to a monstrous block of filthy grey concrete with tiny windows that looks awful from a distance and only gets worse as you get closer.
It wasn't confined to the eastern bloc either, you can find plenty of horrible examples of a similar style dreamed up by western architects infected by similar principles; pretty much anything ugly, grey, concrete, and mid-century. They continue to blight our cities and (especially) our university campuses. But reconstruct a whole city in the same milieu, and you'll have Warsaw.
One of the most visually offensive things about a lot of communist architecture is top-heaviness. It's not just a grey block of filthy concrete, it's a grey block of filthy concrete that looks like it's about to crush you.
I share your opinion that post-WW2 architecture is nightmarish, but do you seriously think that it has to do with political pressure exerted on the architects and engineers by communist authorities? Compare Warsaw with, e. g., Rotterdam, another city which suffered wide-scale destruction in the war. Netherlands never had a communist government, Rotterdam consistently elected its mayors from the ranks of liberal parties (PvdA and VVP), and the engineers there were presumably Dutch rather than Soviet. The results, however, if we talk about the architecture of re-built city sections, were as dismal as in Warsaw. The same goes for other Western European cities extensively developed after WW2: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Milan, Nantes, you name it.
It has. I would really like to enlighten you somehow, but I don't know how to do it in short, so I can only redirect you to reading about Warsaw reconstruction history, look for names/keywords like Bierut, Gomułka, who they were and what they did for/to Warsaw. You can take also a look at the link from my other comment.
I pretty much know the context — I'm from Moscow, we had it no less tough here than you Varsovians. Still, I stand to it that the degradation of architectural aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century was not limited to the Eastern bloc.
Yeah, but ugly is one thing, around here they wanted to make sure Warsaw gets stripped away of its history and culture (and they accomplished it not only by architectural decisions). Making the new version of Warsaw a place much less pleasant to live compared to the pre-ww2 one was kind of part of the plan by the party. The impact was huge and that's why people even from Poland or even some from here just don't like it as a whole, not only how it looks. (Future establishments also made a lot of mess here on top of it, but that's another story)
One thing I can agree is that cities that had to be rebuilt share the common thing that they are often an architectural mess and by that means they are ugly. Let's compare say, Berlin (which actually I like, because I feel it's a better version of Warsaw), even the west part, and gorgeous Prague.
> we had it no less tough here than you Varsovians.
Hmm. One funny thing is that VVD, one of the parties in question, is generally labeled as “conservative-liberal”. Your average American con would probably suffer a mental breakdown when trying to sort it out. (I'm conservative myself, by the way, whatever that might mean here in Russia.)
Hm, not really. The problem is that the USA has a two-party system where each party is in favor of some of the tenets of classic liberalism (civil liberties on one hand, a lightly regulated and taxed economy on the other) but opposed to others, and somehow "liberal" was chosen as a label for the pro-civil-liberties side, ignoring the other aspects of classic liberalism.
In other parts of the world, you have more parties, which makes room for liberal parties that are in favor of both gay marriage and tax breaks for the rich.
"The meaning of "conservatism" in America has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism."[21]"
quoting Feynman from "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
"What is Poland like? My strongest impression — and the one which gives me such a surprise — is that it is almost exactly as I pictured it (except for one detail) — not only in how it looks, but also in the people, how they feel, what they say and think about the government, etc. Apparently we are well informed in the US and magazines such as Time and Atlas are not so bad. The detail is that I had forgotten how completely destroyed Warsaw was during the war and therefore that, with few exceptions (which are easily identified by the bullet holes all over them), all the buildings are built since the war. In fact it is a rather considerable accomplishment — there are very many new buildings: Warsaw is a big city, all rebuilt."
.
.
.
"Oh, I mentioned that one building in Warsaw is interesting to look at. It is the largest building in Poland: the “Palace of Culture and Science” given as a gift by the Soviet Union, It was designed by Soviet architects. Darling, it is unbelievable! I cannot even begin to describe it. It is the craziest monstrosity on land!"
If you've never been to Poland, land in Warsaw, spend a day or two, then head south to Kraków. The amazing disparity between a city leveled in WWII and rebuilt by communists and a city untouched by the Nazis (and therefore the Soviets) is heartbreaking.