CHAPTER TWO
PROLETARIAN AESTHETICS
Technology and Socialism in Eastern Europe
And the work unit nearby shouts, “give me cement!”
PENIU PENEV
from “Beton i Mechti”
on Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
A Czech poster from 1951 shows a studious young man momentarily abandoning his textbook to gaze in wonderment at a massive, new hydroelectric power station that is clearly of Soviet design. The poster reads, “Let us learn Russian. Let us learn from the Soviet Peoples. Work, think, live in a new way.”1 And learn they did, as did Bulgarians, Hungarians, East Germans, Poles, and Romanians. They learned to abandon outmoded forms of capitalist production for largescale industry and collectivized agriculture. In less than a generation, and with the altruistic assistance of their socialist brothers in Moscow, the people of Eastern Europe mastered the modern industrial production of iron, steel, concrete, and petrochemicals. They increased capacity and production of electrical energy manyfold in the first five-year plans alone, and by the 1970s and 1980s they had even installed Soviet-designed nuclear power stations in Lithuania, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Peasants found the answer to backbreaking manual labor in new tractors and combines available from machine tractor stations, making many of them suddenly redundant in rural regions. They streamed to the cities, to such new industrial centers devoted to iron, steel, and petrochemicals (and later even to nuclear reactors) as Nowa Huta, Poland; Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany; Sztalinvaros, Hungary; and Dmitrovgrad, Bulgaria, becoming transformed into devoted socialist workers, again in a few short years.
And yet, what had they learned? Had they learned the glories of industrial production and the production of vast quantities of electrical energy? Had they built a society where modern technologies replaced onerous manual labor with quiet, efficiently operating machinery set in well-ventilated factories? Were they not selflessly and joyously contributing to a new way of life for the new socialist man and woman? What did East European politicians, planners, scientists, and engineers hope to learn from the Soviet peoples? What did the Soviets hope to teach about the benefits of the embrace of large-scale technological systems to transform their nations into modern industrial powers? What power, politics, and influence were at work in this technological relationship? Did it differ from nation to nation? After all, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had relatively modern industries, while the other nations of the socialist brotherhood were highly agrarian. What was the legacy of Stalinist technologies in East Central Europe?
Judging by violent workers’ rebellions in Germany in 1953 and those in Poland and Hungary in 1956 and by the evaporation of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in a matter of weeks, most citizens of East European countries never enjoyed the benefits of socialist technology. They toiled in noisy, dangerous factories that spewed pollutants into the environment and often backed up onto green zones and apartment complexes. They returned home at the end of the day to live in poorly built, mass-produced housing. Unless they were members of the newly formed Communist Party elite or the intelligentsia, they had limited access to such consumer goods as washing machines, televisions, and automobiles. Leaving aside the question of whether these goods ought to have a dominant place in the home, they often lacked even such necessities as good food, clothing, antibiotics, and so on. Soviet leaders had learned little from their failures to provide for the good life for the worker at Magnitogorsk, Norilsk, Asbestos, or any of the dozens of other production cities established under Stalin. They insisted that socialist East Europeans accept their model of development and their technological style—which they did, in some cases and in some branches of the economy with little modification, as they assumed that the proffered technological systems were the key to a modern, socialist life of plenty. Did they lack the resources to improve on Soviet designs? Or, were their options limited because of the political and economic desiderata tied inevitably to any technology? By studying the history of the influence of Soviet technological style on such diverse countries of East Central Europe as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, we may begin to answer some of these questions and can learn a great deal about the complex relationships between the state, politics, and technology generally—and in this case imperial and smaller client states—in the twentieth century.
From Military Conquest to Hero Cities
When his armies crossed East Central Europe on the way to Berlin at the end of World War II, Stalin intended to keep them there to establish client states. The Red Army presence facilitated the installation of communist governments in Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and East Germany. As part of both the Molotov-Ribentropp Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939 and the Soviet invasion, the Baltic states were also incorporated directly as Soviet republics, even if not all western governments recognized them as such. In the 1930s Stalin had offered sanctuary to communist leaders in the region. In Moscow they received office support, salaries, funding for political activities in their homelands, and indoctrination. It remains to consider the role of the Comintern, or Third Communist International, which operated from 1919 to 1943, and the Cominform, its successor organization that survived until 1956, both of which served at the behest of Moscow and were engaged in promoting not only Soviet political ends but also Stalinist economic, industrial, and agricultural programs. In any event, the communist leaders of East Central Europe were prepared to serve both their national comrades and Stalin at the end of the war.
The societies of these countries were largely peasant. With the exception of several sectors of the East German, Czech, and Polish economies, industry was at an early stage of development compared with most of Western Europe. Even East Germany, with its great industrial and scientific heritage, lagged behind the other nations of Europe, including West Germany, and the Soviets stripped both industry and specialists from it as reparations from the war.2 As part of the process of the imposition of communist rule, the countries adopted the Stalinist model of economic development: rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry, forced collectivization of agriculture, and violent change of the natural environment through harnessing of the extractive industries and the construction of power stations. As in the USSR, raw, working-class recruits advanced into managerial positions, Stakhanovite workers demonstrated the joys of overfulfilling production norms, and communist officials held show trials of so-called bourgeois experts, including engineers and other politically unreliable elements. An entire revolution—cultural, political, and social—was the goal. The impact of this revolution was visible in technology and other artifacts as well.
The Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe was a central tension of the cold war. It led to Winston Churchill’s famous pronouncement about the erection of an iron curtain around those nations. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about a Soviet bloc. Many observers posited that a uniform Soviet ideology, political and economic system, and so on, had been imposed on East Central Europe. Yet while Soviet control and influence in many spheres of activity must be admitted, its impact has been exaggerated. The Soviet bloc existed more as an exigency of cold war politics than as a monolithic system. To a greater or lesser degree, for example, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria embraced Stalinist institutions, and they were more Stalinist and less Stalinist in different periods and under different leaders. The countries experimented with their own forms of communism and economic organization, and they resorted to the tools of central economic planning in different ways and with more or less central control, for example, in Hungary with the New Economic Mechanism, by which Hungary adopted a decentralized planning system and established enterprise profitability as a desirable target in an effort to promote market relations. Several countries allowed for greater personal freedoms than in the USSR. The intelligentsia often served as a transmission belt for ideas and innovations to the USSR from Western Europe, owing to their proximity to it and to their longer tradition of contacts with and thinking about civil society.3
Still, most observers will agree that something distinctly “Soviet” distinguished the countries of East Central Europe from their West European counterparts. Political, cultural, and economic institutions are the most obvious. A one-party system prevailed, as did central planning, notions of proletarian democracy, and the creation of a new intelligentsia. Even more remarkable, we can see this distinction in various artifacts: factories, apartment buildings, urban plans, collective farms, automobiles, trucks and tractors, thermal power stations, dams, and so on. Each nation designed, planned, and carried out manufacture and/or construction of these artifacts with its own engineers, many of whom had been trained at European universities. (Many of them received training in the USSR, especially in fields of construction, metallurgy, agriculture, and even nuclear power and its peaceful applications.) When you stood in any square in Budapest, Hungary; Krakow, Poland; or Sofia, Bulgaria, you knew where you were. The influence of Soviet designs was unmistakable. A modest grayness covered most facades. Low-quality concrete was substituted for stone or brick; the concrete has crumbled prematurely. The lack of redundancies of safety and comfort struck the eye. The rush to mass production of basic forms and structures that homogenized the urban landscape was evident in every structure, every machine, every tool, every sidewalk, curb, and street lamp, and it is still evident. Virtually every industrial and agricultural process revealed Soviet influences even if national styles persisted in the generally accepted golden rule of engineering design: “socialist in content, national in form.”
Granted, grayness existed for the workers of Western Europe, too, and planners added green zones to many of their cities only as an afterthought. But if you were blindfolded and taken to a European city, when someone removed your blindfold you would know whether you stood in a city of socialism or capitalism. Why is that? The answer is grayness. Two other factors contributed to grayness. The first was monumental architecture that contributed to a feeling of insignificance of the worker. The second was the absence of consumer culture, hence modest commercial districts with limited storefronts, signage, and shop displays and few decorations.
Of course, the graying of Eastern Europe did not involve calculated decisions to deprive the citizens of comforts and rights that their counterparts in the democracies of Western Europe took for granted. Given the destruction of the physical plants of the cities during the war, the devastation of the countryside, first by German soldiers and then by Soviet soldiers, the stripping of anything that could be stripped and carted off or sold (I have read prewar German physics journals from an institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in the library of the Kurchatov Institute for Atomic Energy), and the relatively low level of agricultural and industrial output to begin with, not to mention the underdevelopment of the consumer sector, the Matyas Rakosi government of Hungary, Boleslaw Bierut of Poland, and Georgi Dimitrov of Bulgaria faced difficult choices in the allocation of resources in rebuilding roads, bridges, railroads, power-generating facilities, and apartment buildings. The situation may have been worse in Budapest owing to the elimination of the Jewish population and its wealth when SS Commander Adolph Eichmann ruthlessly pursued the final solution. In Lithuania, the war lasted until 1948 as partisans and freedom fighters engaged the Red Army in a futile attempt to rid the land of the hated Soviets; this set back Lithuanian recovery. And the Jews of Vilnius suffered the same fate as those of Budapest.
Ultimately, however, the new socialist leaders, planners, architects, and engineers must share the blame for the failure to create architectural structures, energy technologies, and agricultural machines and processes that reflected truly socialist ideals. In keeping with Stalinist programs that emphasized heavy industry at the expense of light industry (housing, food, medical care), they denied investment to those sectors of the economy that would have benefited the worker more directly and immediately. In many cases they deployed factories notorious for pollution and filled with rudimentary and unsafe, if functional, mchine tools. They systematically promoted the collectivization of agriculture, seeing the peasant as an enemy of progress, and drained resources for the industrialization effort from the countryside. They harshly transformed the peasant into a worker (and the countryside into an agricultural machine), forced socialist upbringing on him, eradicated his worldview, and declared his way of doing things as unscientific. They redesigned cities to make them comfortable for automobiles, not for pedestrians; they built monuments to glorify the party and its leaders, and in so doing they eliminated human scale in construction. The aesthetics of socialist countries required large-scale, unappealing structures that proclaimed the importance of the state and its artifacts, not of the individual worker.
Leaders in Eastern Europe had two major paths to consider for postwar reconstruction and modernization. One was the capitalist West, with the paradigmatic industrial superpower, the United States, working closely with European democracies and the vanquished fascist regimes to rebuild them after the war through the Marshall Plan, through which the U.S. government gave $14 billion to reconstruction over four years. The eastern nations had maintained ties with both the West and Russia to the east; their scientists, engineers, and planners had frequently studied, attended conferences, and published in the West, so that the lessons of U.S. and European modernization were crucial. Yet given the influence of—and military occupation by—the USSR, and since their leaders had been frequently trained in the Stalinist Communist International, the nations necessarily oriented themselves toward the eastern Marxist model. They embraced to one degree or another heavy industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and technological style that often reflected Soviet designs. After a brief period of divergent approaches and open governments, these nations entered a period of high Stalinism (1948–54). Soviet and East European leaders believed that rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture with their attendant political, social, economic, and technological changes would enable them to establish not only power and legitimacy but also security against the capitalist nations. They centered some of their efforts on the establishment of “hero” or production cities that were modeled on their Soviet counterparts. These hero cities garnered a substantial share of the budget and were crucial for symbolic cultural purposes as well as technical ones.
In the Soviet Union Communist Party leaders organized the mass transformation of peasant society into an industrial one at huge construction sites, at such so-called hero projects as Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, the Moscow Metro, and the Belomor Canal. Parallel strategies were pursued at Nowa Huta, Dimitrovgrad, Stalinstadt (Eisenhüttenstadt), the Vitkovice Steelworks in Bohemia, Martin Machine Works in Slovakia, and elsewhere—cities that were dedicated to producing copious amounts of ore, iron, steel, cement, chemicals, and electrical energy. Hero cities consisted of a series of large-scale technological systems that were intended to trigger rapid social, economic, and cultural revolutions as well as an industrial one. Not unlike in the West, the socialists organized central bureaucracies to manage massive factories and the workers who toiled in them, but they believed that they would avoid the human costs of industrialization under capitalism. They simultaneously reformed scientific research institutes, universities, and schools, orienting them toward Marxist thought and standard curricula to ensure common approaches, with faculty constantly scrutinized to ensure political reliability. Engineering and vocational education often had precedence over training in the humanities. Political leaders believed that the technology of production was the essential force in the rapid transformation from capitalism to socialism, and they believed that the proletariat would benefit from the change. Yet here a kind of battlefield thinking emerged with laborers and materiel being sacrificed to ideology and being mobilized for the final assault on outdated capitalist approaches, often without regard for the very beneficiaries, their ways of life, and the local environment.
Those individuals east or west who have lived in or visited the socialist towns of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union recognize the difference in the quality of life in comparison with similar factory towns of Western Europe and North America, such as Gary, Indiana; in the Ruhrgebiet in Germany; or Manchester, England. Although generally employing many of the same techniques and materials used in building these cities and towns, the result of industrial design under socialist direction was a poverty of styles and blandness in color exacerbated by rudimentary functionality. Nor in provision of schools, stores, clinics, or other social services did socialist urban centers distinguish themselves—even in the flagship “hero cities” of technological display and Marxian glory, this social overhead capital lagged considerably. In fact, they were often little distinguishable from each other, from the layout of traffic patterns to the squares and streets named after acceptable Soviet and national revolutionary leaders; from the trails, paths, and pruned trees and bushes in green regions to the smoke-belching trucks, cars, and buses that put parks under constant assault; from daily newspapers proclaiming the glories of the socialist experiment to the massive edifices of state and industrial buildings that indicated the glory of the state but not the worker; and most importantly, to the technologies of production that were the quintessence of the values of socialist politicians, planners, and engineers. Granted, workers were promised free, basic universal medical care and education; rents and food prices were kept low; and literacy rates rapidly increased.
Yet workers found housing to be minimal and uncomfortable, the cities often lacked basic services, and the agricultural sector never recovered from the socialist experiment. I refer to the sum of these political, economic, ideological, technological, and aesthetic factors as “grayness.” Intended to ensure the docile cooperation of workers and their families, the towns failed on most fronts to achieve this end owing to their grayness. To be sure, there are shades of gray: there was no standard hero city, university, or research institute, no stereotypical peasant or worker. The countries were more or less industrial; more or less forced collectivization on peasants; more or less established modern factories, trained workers, and educated engineers and scientists; and were more or less gray. Our understanding of the ways in which the nations diverged from Stalinism and from Soviet practices for a variety of technological systems remains incompletely explored. The divergences include how East European countries adapted technologies and their ideological structures to local and national conditions. Here, however, I focus on the grayness as manifested in “proletarian aesthetics.”
Proletarian Aesthetics: Soviet Technological Style in Eastern Europe
A series of engineering decisions, ideological positions, and financial considerations led to construction of gray cities and lifestyles, at the root of which was proletarian aesthetics. Proletarian aesthetics was based on four concerns that had far-reaching, interrelated social, political, and engineering consequences. The first concern was egalitarianism in technology. For example, in a classless society, workers would live in equally splendid—or equally dilapidated—apartment buildings. They would own the same furnishings. There was no need, as in bourgeois society, for status to be reflected in different furnishings, baubles, or styles. This egalitarianism would avoid endemic duplication of roughly similar goods, such as refrigerators, desks, dressers, even doors and windows, and at the same time also achieve efficiencies in production and lower costs. The leveling of quality that accompanied the development of a few basic designs for many products across an entire nation had the bonus features of keeping construction costs low and discouraging nationalism. If the genre of socialist realist art, literature, and music stressed qualities of the new socialist man and women, why could not homes and factories of similar design and function bring the fraternal brothers and sorority sisters of East European nations into harmony with their big brothers and sisters in Moscow?
The second source of proletarian aesthetics was an exaggerated level of interest in mass production, owing to these egalitarian ideological precepts, yet scarcities of finished goods, and to the fascination with, if not fetishization of, Fordism among many Marxists. Such Soviet leaders as Lenin and especially Trotsky wrote extensively about the glories of the assembly line that must be applied willy-nilly in the economy.4 In the effort to rebuild rapidly after the war, socialist engineers and planners sought to find economies everywhere in huge engineering projects. This led to crash programs to develop concrete and reinforced concrete industries and to the adoption of simple, prefabricated concrete forms produced in them for apartments, offices, and highways. They used them as floors, walls, walls with windows, and walls with doorways; these could always be used for playgrounds or road surfaces. The Danube Cement and Lime Works (near Budapest) was a leader in this technology. The Polish industry built on substantial prewar foundations to become the largest in East Central Europe.5 Factories sprang up like mushrooms throughout Eastern Europe in burgeoning industrial towns. Similarly, just as their Soviet counterparts, metallurgical, mining, and other facilities employed standard components and materials: corrugated steel roofs, steel staircases, and standard piping, conduit, generators, and machine tools. These facilities were functional but did little to ensure the safety of workers or the surrounding region in case of accidents or from environmental abuse.
Third, owing to the highly centralized nature of policy making, as part of the drive to keep costs down, and perhaps out of fear of local initiatives (and styles), the main bureaucracies in the capitals adopted universal specifications for pipe, conduit, concrete, prefabricated forms, wiring, telephone poles, roads, even turbogenerators—in a word, all construction technologies and practices. For example, in Poland the Ministry of Building and Building Materials Industry followed closely the example of Gostroi (the State Construction Committee), Gosstandart (the State Committee on Standards), and Gosplan (the State Planning Administration) in Moscow in quickly setting standards that then became difficult to alter even when safety and efficiency concerns indicated that they ought to. These national codes and specifications not only for building materials but for entire designs often followed the Soviet lead in a wide range of facilities and structures that held for an entire country, often irrespective of local geological, meteorological, and other considerations. On the one hand, the adoption of standards enabled them more quickly to turn to the task of rebuilding from the devastation of the war. On the other hand, while planners and engineers hoped that the application of these mass production techniques and materials might enable them efficiently to overcome the poor materials and workmanship they encountered in the field, they could not exhort underpaid and overworked laborers to perform, and the resulting facilities were often poorly built. A question that remains is to what extent engineers, architects, and planners from Moscow served as emissaries throughout Eastern Europe to spread the gospel of technological equality, visiting the bureaucracies and state committees of their counterparts in Bucharest, Budapest, and Warsaw, and how East European specialists both accepted this technological style and adapted it to their regional requirements.
The drive for mass production and the search for economies of scale may have led to premature fixing of parameters for many technologies for other reasons as well. Engineers pursued a reasonable effort to cut innovation and construction costs and time. Yet in some cases, this tied industry to the production of simple, functional designs that lacked safety and environmental redundancies. Once they had developed the prototype of a device that they believed worked well enough, they turned rapidly to commercialization of that device in a process that might be called the “prototype approach.” An aesthetics based on standardization, rationalization, and mass production of components thereby joined with the political and economic pressures to meet production targets. This, in turn, generated technologies noteworthy for bland, functional designs in which safety and comfort played a secondary role and in which environmental issues were rarely raised. There were few redundancies or backup or safety devices that extended even to the nuclear industry. Similarly, and shockingly, workers toiled at agricultural and industrial sites without helmets, goggles, ear protection, protective clothing, or steel-toed shoes.
The last aspect of proletarian aesthetics was gigantomania. Gigantomania itself had several sources. One was competition with the capitalist West to be first, bigger, best. In addition, party leaders found it easier to organize the mass transformation of peasant society into an industrial one at huge construction sites and in hero cities. Armed with simple tools and exposed to the elements, the peasants cum workers toiled not only to build the factory or urban center or canal at hand, not only to create a site of great ideological significance for indicating the glories of state socialism, but also to master the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, atheism, central planning, selflessness, collectivism, and allegiance to the party and its five-year plans. At hero projects throughout Eastern Europe divisions of workers were assembled whose every movement was scrutinized to ensure that they remained in lockstep with plans. These workers were joined together in construction firms that rapidly grew to hold thousands of employees. Ultimately, both the environment and people were the objects of the transforming visions of large-scale technologies, with peasants and “enemies of the people” to be transformed into workers and citizens, and nature to become a rationally ordered machine that also functioned according to plan.
Shades of Gray
The focus on large-scale technologies to understand the notion of “grayness” may unsettle some readers who see in various locales, sectors of the economy, and specific technologies those individual cases that suggest a wide variety of technological styles across East Central Europe. No matter these cases, the Soviet influences in the reconstruction and establishment of large sectors of the economy loom large. We see rudimentary safety systems in energy and metallurgy, overriding interest in simple concrete forms in housing and construction, and forced collectivization in agriculture. To achieve these ends, political leaders, who were often trained in Moscow, established a political culture that resembled that in the USSR, from show trials to arrests, from embrace of heavy industry at the expense of the consumer sector to repainting of the educational and scientific research systems that turned out legions of narrowly trained specialists who sought to build and rebuild industry and agriculture in a socialist way.
Some readers may also worry that the entire concept of “grayness” is based on the intention to write a history of the victors. Indeed, several historians have adopted the position that because the capitalists won the cold war, we must examine closely the failings of the socialist losers. This would lead us to ignore the achievements of socialism in housing, transport, and so on. To ensure a nuanced discussion of areas of innovation and achievement, as well as the challenges and missteps of policy makers, planners, and engineers in East Central Europe, we consider those leaders’ own pronouncements about what they intended to achieve through modern technology and what they promised in the way of benefits for the masses. They advanced a rhetoric of progress, they promised a radiant future, and they give us the benchmarks by which to judge their achievements in their own quite public five-year plans, editorials, and official reports. We will thereby avoid the temptation to condemn socialist leaders, policy makers, and engineers by western standards either for shortcomings in design or for the environmental and social costs of employing them throughout various landscapes of modernizing societies.
The socialist nations achieved remarkable success in meeting the goals of rebuilding war-torn societies in short order, setting out to create egalitarian societies, and striving to provide inexpensive housing, energy, education, and medicine to all citizens. The leaders rebuilt cities, housing, industry, and agriculture rapidly after the destruction of the war. And there were many levels of success and innovation associated with Stalinist technological style that suggest similarity with innovation in the West. Public works were one such region of socialist accomplishment, for example, the transport networks of Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague, the power generation systems in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and so on. It would be well to keep in mind that many of the public works projects had roots in the 1920s and 1930s when not only the USSR but also National Socialist Germany, France, England, and the United States engaged in massive transportation, irrigation, flood control, hydroelectricity, road construction, and other large-scale efforts. Socialist leaders themselves recognized the value of their achievements here. At various construction sites for these public works “hero projects,” political officers proselytized the gathered peasants cum workers about the glories of socialism in comparison with evil, exploitative capitalism. They proclaimed that technology would serve the masses, not the capitalist owners or managers. They pointed to the subway system with its huge, vaulted stations; polished granite walls, floors, and benches; and murals that spread the message of equality and victory over nature and capitalism as evidence that they were well on the path to socialism.
What they produced nonetheless was gray. Bare, functional designs were intended to ensure longevity and ease of repair of many machines, buildings, roads, and other technologies, but they quickly wilted under the pressure of centralized economic planning. Apartment buildings were no sooner completed than they began to decay, fading from one shade of gray to another. While subway and railway wagon cars have stood the test of time in many respects—their unadorned plastic seats rarely crack and their linoleum floors have only thinned and darkened under the assault of passengers—they nonetheless transported workers lifelessly to work and back. Think also of the significant costs of the socialist development program for citizens of Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary in terms of public health, environmental degradation, and quality of life, however the latter are measured, not to mention in terms of personal freedoms. After an initial burst of growth connected with rebuilding, the economies of East Central Europe themselves turned gray, stagnating in the 1970s and especially 1980s, and falling behind international standards in terms of productivity, competitiveness, and environmentally sound production. The promised future of the bright colors and plentiful consumption never arrived. In each country, officials presided over a lag in production of the comforts of life, at the same time as the factories rusted, or perhaps even melted away. Central planning failed to adjust to new circumstances. The advantages of the socialist economies of cheap raw materials and low wages were lost. The share of intellectual products and services related to production remained low. Overcentralization and the massive size of enterprises hindered reforms. The spread of electronics in production and management (numerically controlled machine tools, computers) lagged; superclean processes and materials were rarely employed; and biotechnology, telecommunications, and rational energy technologies had little place.6
Of course, the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and resulting de-Stalinization campaigns throughout East Central Europe had immediate and diverse impacts on the policies of all of the nations. A political, economic, and cultural thaw ensued to one degree or another, in some cases leading to short-lived rebellions. The effect on Stalinist technological style was also observable and measurable. Regarding housing, for example, the rapid adoption of simple prefabricated concrete forms and equally rapid deterioration in the quality of apartment buildings by the late 1950s and especially in the 1970s have led some observers to suggest that housing was notably “grayer” in the last decades of socialist power than under Stalin, and that true “grayness” commences with the Brezhnev era in Eastern Europe, especially after the Prague Spring of 1968. Stalin-era apartment, office, memorial, and other buildings were sturdy, with massive facades and ornate decorations, with spacious interiors, high ceilings, and parquet floors to suggest the glory of the proletariat. Later apartment buildings were mass-produced. They were small with narrow corridors and low ceilings. They were barely functional conglomerations of tight spaces and poor craftsmanship. Although they were better than the communal apartments, barracks, and dormitories in which most of them had previously lived, they suggested to the inhabitants—after the initial excitement of getting a home—that they had little more to look forward to, except perhaps to fill them with bookcases, overwrought storage cabinet wall units, and hundreds of books. Demand for appliances far exceeded supply. Lumber, wiring, plumbing, and other hardware were rarely available. All of this reinforced the feeling that citizens were nothing next to the state and its representatives.
Stalinist architecture set the trend for grayness in other ways. First, the best of the apartments—those most centrally located and with the finest appointments—went to the party and technical elites, not workers. Second, the massiveness of Stalinist buildings suggested the power of the state and party, not the glories of the proletariat. And third, the miserable and miserly experience of workers at Magnitogorsk, Nowa Huta, Eisenhüttenstadt, Volgodonsk, and Bratsk was always the rule, both under Stalin and after his death. Workers were often forced to live in unheated and insect-infested barracks while they waited for construction of the main factory objects to be completed, and schools, hospitals, and stores followed only at some delay.
Of course, citizens in socialist nations had a range of experiences across the processes of industrialization, collectivization, and political and cultural revolution. Some scholars argue, for instance, that collectivization in the German Democratic Republic was quiet successful, that peasants welcomed it, and that levels of production rivaled those in the Federal Republic of Germany.7 Another scholar suggests that collectivized agriculture served as an inspiration for the rise of highly productive modern agribusinesses as farmers in the West recognized great potential in modern tractors, combines, and harvesters to work expansive tracts of land that stretched to the horizon.8 Yet consider the basic point of collectivization: it was class war against the somewhat wealthier members of the peasantry, the so-called kulaks; in some cases it was murderous, and significant social costs and disruptions accompanied it as it triggered migration to the cities. Life was gray, Comrades!9
Ubiquitous Smokestacks of Hero Cities
Smoke from smokestacks runs
Squint-eyed is the sun
Squint, sun, squint your eyes
If it were not for the smokestacks
worse would be our lives.
F. HRUBIN, Czech poet, 195210
The states of East Central Europe lagged behind most other European nations in level of industry and the infrastructures to support them. They emerged from World War II with their lands and economies devastated, their populations having been displaced or lost to war, and their governments in shambles. When German armies withdrew, they often destroyed what they could not use. Stalin’s Red Army replaced them, making it possible eventually for socialist governments to take power by force, subterfuge, and elections that were often rigged. Having taken power, the communists set out to duplicate the model of economic development that Stalin pursued in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s of collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization. In three-, five-, or seven-year plans and their attendant political and cultural desiderata, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany embarked on this path. They built up heavy industry as rapidly as possible, ignoring as a result light industry such as housing and medicine. They built showcase cities of the industrialization effort: Nowa Huta, Stalinstadt, Dimitrovgrad, Stalinstadt, and Sztalinvaros.11 The countries of East Central Europe set out on that path from different levels of industrial development, social and political turmoil, and devotion to the ideal Stalinist program. Yet they all pursued the program.
Because of the focus of investment on heavy industry and on hero cities, such infrastructure crucial to the balanced functioning of society and economy as housing and public transport lagged. The towns and landscapes around them turned gray and unappealing. Sidewalks and muddy paths ended in fields of rubbish, sewer pipes remained uncovered, and poor finishing work distinguished stacks of concrete buildings in workers’ towns and villages. Stalinist technological practices, while tempered by efforts to create distinctively socialist urban settings, ultimately centered on the search for proletarian egalitarianism in the technology of concrete and occasionally brick. That means that another source of grayness was, paradoxically, the effort to demonstrate the glories of socialism before the capitalist world. In keeping with Stalinist programs that emphasized heavy industry at the expense of light industry, they denied investment to those sectors of the economy that would have benefited the worker more directly and immediately, especially in workers’ settlements.
While the authorities established the hero cities as monuments to workers, the cities fell short of this goal in a number of ways. First, the cities were homages to factories and production, not to the worker liberated from menial labor. In fact, he remained alienated from labor, having to work in dangerous environments with minimal safety equipment. Manual labor predominated. Second, the cities were laid out and organized to stress the importance of production and allegiance to targets set by central planning bodies. Factories were industrial temples with metaphysical meaning. The scale of avenues that led to the factories, the facades, and the buildings themselves spoke of the power of the state, not the privileged position of the worker. Third, construction of such social overhead capital as bicycle paths, tram lines and other transportation systems, and even schools, clinics, libraries, and stores always followed belatedly after factories had been erected. In terms of parks and public spaces, however, the socialist city occasionally exceeded its capitalist counterpart in size. In essence, hero cities were consciously constructed monuments to the socialist model of rapid economic development based on Stalinist precepts and technologies. These included the belief that heavy industry was the key to all economic growth, that the peasant would become a worker in the city, and that the peasant cum worker would recognize the glories of socialist state power precisely at the forge, on the scaffolding, or at the night school where he had the opportunity to learn a narrow technical specialization that prepared him to become a productive and satisfied cog in the socialist machine, if not an engineer.
In addition to the physical apparatuses, devices, and systems that link modern society, beyond the railways and roadways, the canals and engineered rivers, the bridges and harbors, power generation, transmission, and distribution systems, communications, and the buildings, factories, homes, and apartments in which users toiled and lived—in addition to all of these things, socialist officials, planners, and engineers employed another technology or technique in the form of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology. This ideology gave both symbolic and operational meaning to the physical structures. It distinguished those structures visually, physically, environmentally, even edaphically. It gave them meaning as forums for the creation of new socialist men and women. It stressed industry, especially metallurgical, construction, and extractive industries. Not surprisingly, since they were oriented toward the factories in all ways, the towns and cities that arose in the 1950s and beyond therefore had an industrial feel to them. Technique also included the de rigueur three-, five-, and seven-year plans.
The first five-year plan of Hungary reveals all of the features of Stalinist economic desiderata in full flower. In its introduction, the document refers to the role of the “glorious army” of the USSR in having “liberated Hungary from the regime of the German imperialists, [and] crushed the oppressive state-power of the Hungarian capitalists and large land owners.” A three-year plan to rebuild the economy followed, which was completed—of course—eight months ahead of schedule. The subsequent five-year plan (1950–54) had the main goal of “the transformation of Hungary from an agrarian-industrial country into an industrial-agrarian country.”12 Just as Stalin set superhuman and outrageous targets for increasing industrial production in his first five-year plan (1929–33), so in Hungary by 1954 industrial output would be nearly 200 percent the 1949 level, and the number of workers would nearly double from 250,000 to 480,000, including “53,000 intellectual workers of different professions.” Coal, iron, manganese, and bauxite extraction would increase, as would the foundry industry to process it: machine building would increase 138 percent; electrical energy production, 100 percent; building materials, 114.8 percent; and chemical production, 138 percent. Two-hundred and sixty-three enterprises centered on mining, metallurgy, chemical production, and electricity would be built. Szeged, Debrecen, Hodmezovasarhely, Bekescsaba, Mako, Szolnok, Keskemet, Zalaegerszeg, Veszprem, Gyöngyös, Szekszard, and other cities would become industrial centers almost overnight.13 Of course, officials promised similar increases in light industry, but these did not materialize because of the overriding emphasis of investment in industry for state power.
The plans enabled Hungarian leaders to pursue a program of transformation of social and political structures accelerated by the creation of urban-industrial infrastructure.14 In 1930 peasants were 31 percent of the population; agricultural laborers and day workers, about 20 percent; workers (skilled and unskilled), 19 percent; white collar and intelligentsia, 7 percent; and merchants, 8 percent. According to the 1949 census, workers still made up only 20 percent of the population. The war destroyed one-quarter of manufacturing capacity, one-third of all bridges, and more than one-half of all livestock. Manufacturing in 1948 was but 36 percent of the prewar level. Through a large-scale program for industrialization and collectivization of agriculture (essentially completed by the beginning of the 1960s), by 1970 50 percent of Hungarian wage earners were workers (although 30% still semi- or unskilled).15
The socialist nations chose different paths to industrialization and collectivization. Across the region communist leaders instituted collectivization in harsh or softer forms around 1948 as part of Stalinization of the economy. In Hungary, for example, under hard-liner Matyas Rakosi, the party abandoned notions of private ownership of land, called for pooling of private holdings in collectives, and lowered from 142 acres to 35 acres the amount of land needed to apply the label of “kulak” on a peasant; soon other individuals of modest background—merchants, priests, and others—became “kulaks.” Collectivization slowed to a crawl because of peasant opposition. After the death of Stalin and Rakosi’s replacement by Imre Nagy, Nagy relaxed coercive measures. But the unrest of 1953 and 1956 led many peasants who had joined cooperative farms to flee them.16 The leaders recognized the need to scale back plans, to end coercive measures, and to increase the standard of living on the collective farms.
Hungarian officials confronted the great problem after the war that much of the housing stock had been destroyed. By the inauguration of the three-year plan in 1949, however, most of the dwellings destroyed during the war had been reconstructed or repaired, while 35,000 new dwellings were built in Budapest. Partitioning of apartments and homes resulted in more dwellings in Budapest in 1948 than in 1941, as well as an increase in population density. But this was insufficient because, in the turmoil of the late 1940s, a wave of migrants entered the capital, some 30,000 to 50,000 people annually. They came for jobs, having fled the countryside because of collectivization, many of them identified as kulaks. With the first five-year plan, the inadequate housing policy led to an “overall decline in living standards.” The five-year plan had no provision to overcome regional or sectoral disparities so that egalitarianism disappeared in territorial inequalities between the center and periphery, between city and village, and industry and agriculture had little impact. Budapest received the largest share of industrial investment. The only explicit territorial conception was a plan for new socialist towns.17
In this atmosphere, this working class found little to rejoice about at work, home, or play. By the end of the 1960s, approximately 10 percent of the urban population lived in housing developments, but the people were not favorably disposed to them. The reason was the shortage of streets, parks, and squares, which led to formation of anonymous communities, “groups of people haphazardly brought together.” This “dullness of life” was manifested in part “in the uniform, monotonous character of buildings … and in the low level of provision with various institutions.” Many neighborhoods lacked shops, bookstores, and so on, and several were poorly served by public transport.18 Hungary continued to suffer from significant housing shortages into the 1980s, and efforts by the state to redistribute flats and to offer subsidies to the state-owned rented flat sector did not level differences, but increased inequality.19
Would it be different in a city named after Joseph Stalin? Sztalinvaros (Stalin City), now the city of Dunaujvaros with 60,000 inhabitants, was home to the Lenin (now Danube) Steelworks. Sztalinvaros was a planned city built in the early 1950s near Dunapentele, 70 kilometers south of Budapest on the west bank of the Danube. The socialist government regarded the smallholders, fishermen, and manorial laborers who inhabited the fields in the area surrounding the village of Dunapentele and the craftsmen and small businessmen in the village itself with suspicion. The secret police expelled politically unreliable elements as a first step toward a new socialist city in which village, factory, city, and natural landscape would come together.20
Sztalinvaros involved the major features of Stalinist development: collectivization of agriculture and the formation of industrial centers as magnets for workers, where peasants, lumpenproletariat, and other individuals were transformed into conscious socialist citizens. Almost overnight Sztalinvaros developed from a small village into an industrial city with steel foundries, iron works, and chemical industries. Its population swelled to 28,000 by 1956. As at Stalin’s steel city hero project Magnitogorsk fifteen years earlier, the process was wrought with violence to people and things.21 The Stalin Steelworks dominated the city—and the nation—in many ways, including by taking the single largest investment component of Hungary’s first-five year plan. Would the city indicate the promise of industrial transformation? Would Stalin City give industrial employment to the rural poor and transform them into loyal citizens of socialist Hungary?
Sztalinvaros was for party loyalists a beacon of socialist industrial future, but for peasants it symbolized an attack on their way of life. One thousand construction workers arrived in May 1950. Those arriving sought to escape poverty, high taxes, compulsory grain deliveries, and dislocation in the countryside like the Russian peasants who fled to Magnitogorsk to avoid de-kulakization. The locals deeply resented the new arrivals. Still, by Christmas 5,860 workers had joined the construction site, and by January 1952 over 14,000 laborers were at work. Like at Magnitogorsk, Sztalinvaros, as Pittaway writes, was “a workshop of chaos, low wages, despotic management and poor working conditions.” Facing constant exhortation to meet impossible targets, the workers felt not in the least to be a part of the glorious communist future. And like throughout Eastern Europe, the Communist Party alienated them in new city designs that excluded a church from the city center; these were deeply religious peasants being forced to adopt a new worldview, suddenly if not violently. They resented the recruiters who had destroyed their way of life.22
In Stalin City urban planners adopted socialist monumentalist style that glorified state power and industry. They designed the main roads to display and facilitate industrial power, while residential areas were located away from arterial roads. The city lay at one end of the main road, Stalin Street, and the factory, separated from the city by 1 kilometer stretch of woodland, at the other end. The city’s main square, according to the lead architect, was to be “a large, stone-flagged, vegetation free” area to serve as an end point for parades and demonstrations. In this way, as in Stalinstadt and Nowa Huta, politics and production were two poles of the city.23 According to lead architect Tibor Weiner, the concept of the socialist city emerged during the construction. Hence, the project became a “school for Hungarian urban construction.” According to Pittaway, Soviet models were important to the Hungarians, but they interacted “both with the material factors of Hungary’s cold war industrialization drive and more local circumstances to produce Sztalinvaros’s urban form.”24
To some observers Sztalinvaros “managed to retain its human scale and friendly atmosphere.” A number of the first planners were trained in the Bauhaus, and several of the buildings demonstrate its influence.25 One observer wrote the following:
In the center of Sztalinvaros they built low-rise, four-storey blocks of flats around wide streets laid out at right angles, interspersed with various public buildings in Stalinist neo-Classical style, though some were also built in the Modernist Bauhaus style. As it was a politically prestigious urban construction project, artists were drawn in, enrolled on the books of factories and given flats, with the result that the town came to have a high per capita ratio of artworks. Some of the heroic proletarian reliefs and statues produced at the time can still be seen today, as can a number of vibrant colored frescoes, notably above the main gate of the steelworks.26
Ultimately, however, the city was designed to pay homage to the steel mill. One journalist wrote, “At night the fires of Pentele’s chimneys light the sky; their sparks like sparkling red stars breaking apart the darkness. Above the former prairie and the banks, the woods and the gardens they rise, lighting the tractors that stand in the fields.”27 According to Gabor Fencsik, “The press was filled with the praises of the heroic shock workers building the gigantic furnaces and rolling mills. The press was lying, of course: the plant was being built largely with slave labor. One economist calculated that for Hungary it would be cheaper to import steel from Belgium in one-pound air mail packages than to produce it at the Sztalinvaros plant. The economist was put in a labor camp for his pains, and the construction of the steel plant went ahead.”28
The political leaders might have been able to erect industrial structures, but they were unsuccessful in creating a proletariat loyal to heavy industry. The hero workers in hero cities took their responsibilities as the vanguard of the revolution seriously. They noted that both their and the Soviet governments had abandoned principles of workers’ democracy and egalitarianism. They objected vigorously to the privileged position of party hacks and the absence of workers’ control. They publicly attacked the hypocrisy, writing letters to higher party instances and, during the revolution of 1956, going to the barricades. As soon as the revolution broke out, workers in the main industrial towns—Miskolc, Gyor, Szolnok, Pécs, and Debrecen—set up revolutionary committees and councils. The miners in Pécs, Sztalinvaros, Tatabanya, and Varpalota formed councils in the mines, the steelworkers formed councils in the steel mills, and power station operators formed councils in the power stations. They armed themselves, took over radio stations, and roused the masses to maintain their vigilance. The councils published programs in which they called for political and civil liberties, worker management of the means of production, autonomy for trade unions and political party, and of course immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. After Soviet troops occupied Budapest on Nikita Khrushchev’s orders early in November 1956, local resistance spread to other cities and neighborhoods. The fiercest fighting was precisely in working-class suburbs of Budapest such as Ujpest and Csepel Island. At Sztalinvaros, the workers battled Soviet troops, joining Hungarian officers and members of the local garrison irrespective of party or religious affiliation. The workers “declared that they would defend against invading Soviet forces the plant and houses which they had built with their own hands.” When Soviet forces crushed the armed uprising, the workers continued to battle by mass strikes and passive resistance against the new regime and its Soviet masters.29
Because these authorities considered Sztalinvaros a symbol of the industrial ethos of modern Soviet socialism, they were shocked when the workers in a hero city followed the example of those in Budapest to organize a council to represent workers’ rights. No doubt some of them realized that at best they had fostered docility toward arbitrariness and resignation toward the propaganda of increased production. These councils appeared throughout the nation under various names, but those in Dunapentele and Miskolc were among the first. The councils represented all segments of the population: workers, university students, soldiers and officers, intellectuals and peasants.30 On October 25, hard-core communists ordered troops to fire on a Dunapentele demonstration. Eight people were killed and twenty-eight wounded. The workers fought back, and the soldiers had to retreat to their barracks. A helicopter came to rescue a Soviet official, his family, and senior army officers from the crowds, at which point the Hungarian army went over to the workers. As in other cities around the country, the workers seized radio stations and broadcast appeals for weapons and equipment. These Radio “Rákóczi” broadcasts (named after Prince Francis II Rákóczi, who led a rebellion in the eighteenth century against the Hapsburgs) appealed to the International Red Cross for help. Eventually Soviet troops put down the revolution, killing thousands of freedom fighters throughout the nation, perhaps 1,800 to 2,000 in Budapest and 2,500 to 3,000 in the rest of the country, destroying city infrastructure and arresting and carting off university students to unknown destinations.31 Their constant encounters with grayness at home, with proselytizing of the joys of industrial production at work, and with the patent falsity of workers’ democracy in daily life had led them to revolution. Would it be different in Poland?
Steel Production to Convert the Polish Peasant to Socialism
Powerful construction rises straight up
Somewhere else, in the arms
we left our sleep
moved out from our minds and thoughts
And here is only one thing:
Finish the construction
before morning
Our muscles are burning
from the labor
The challenging construction rises up
meter after meter
up
straight
And after work
our t-shirts
Stick close to the body cause of sweat
and then
They started to sing a song
which will also build the city.32
A Polish socialist realist poem
Rebuilding from the war devastation contributed to the decision to adopt streamlined projects to conserve capital and ultimately to employ industrial mass production construction techniques rather than other more aesthetically pleasing and comprehensive designs. The designs also skimped on safety and environmental equipment. At the same time, socialist goals for the transformation of agrarian societies into industrial ones through collectivization reinforced reliance on initially limited labor inputs to build and operate hero cities. Poland lost one-sixth of her population in World War II; her major cities were destroyed and her industry ruined. Stalin added economic insult by partitioning the country effectively with borders moved to the west. The Polish communists under the Stalinist Boleslaw Bierut installed one-party rule in 1948, followed by arrests and show trials of alleged enemies, persecution of the church, and harsh collectivization of agriculture. To gain favor with the masses, the Communist Party commenced socialist reconstruction of industry and agriculture in 1949 with the promise to provide them wealth, consumer goods, and cultural renaissance.33 The renaissance appeared in the rebuilding of Warsaw and the building of Nowa Huta, as well as in mining and metallurgy, unfortunately at the expense of other regions of the country and sectors of the economy.
Socialist leaders emphasized the creation of the modern infrastructure for the metallurgical, mining, construction, and electrical energy industries. Investment in these industries meant that other sectors and other regions of the country received less attention. The emphasis on these industries is understandable given the desire to transform peasant societies into proletarian ones and the belief that increased production in iron and steel most likely would trigger growth in related sectors. In Poland the iron, steel, and coal industries grew rapidly between 1945 and 1955. Steel targets of the three-year Plan of Reconstruction from 1947 to 1949 were surpassed. With 6 percent of industrial labor force by 1955 and 7 percent of the share of value of output of industry, steel was crucial for machine-building, motors, transport, and other sectors that employed 22 percent of the industrial labor force and produced 24 percent of industrial output.34
At first, the rebuilding of Warsaw and all of Poland was a focus of modernist interest among architects who viewed this as a unique opportunity to build a new Warsaw centered on the needs of the population. Many of them had been émigrés based at the University of Liverpool. They saw Poland as a tabula rasa opportunity, a hope that seemed reciprocated when the government established an Office for the Supervision of Aesthetic Production (BNEP) within the Ministry of Culture and Art. BNEP stressed professional values over ideological ones during the three-year plan commencing in 1947.35 Yet the cold war heightened the pressure to discern strict ideological differences between capitalism and socialism, including in its technologies, and this shifted attention to include culture and design, especially after purges of individuals seen to be anticommunist or otherwise enemies. As in the USSR, an “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” unfolded. Suddenly, the goal was to make Poland a Stalinist state with a crash six-year plan. In urban planning socialist realism replaced the modernist ethos. Officials of the Union of Architects attacked so-called antisocial and cosmopolitan functionalist architectural practices. They preferred to design huge office buildings and other structures to symbolize state power according to the doctrine “socialist in content, national in form,” which meant an inevitable reorientation to the Soviet east. Jakub Berman, a Stalinist who honed his skills in Moscow and served in the Polish Politburo, said that “copying the model of the Soviet Union was obligatory in every sphere.”36
The Soviet conquest of Poland involved the expulsion of the Nazis. Nazi invaders intended to free the country of Jews and enslave the Poles to work for German residents. They intended to replace Warsaw with a city one-twentieth its original size, Warschau, home to 100,000 Germans served by 80,000 Polish slaves in a labor camp. Plans for Warschau disappeared as Nazi defeat grew imminent; German armies burned Warsaw to the ground after the Jewish and Polish uprisings; 85 percent of buildings were destroyed. After the war, citizens engaged in spontaneous rebuilding with the removal of rubble. In 1949 the communists took political control—and control over rebuilding—as manifested in a six-year plan for reconstruction of Warsaw under Boleslaw Bierut. Socialist realist public architecture centered on highly visible buildings with important political functions erected next to new Soviet monuments. They commenced the construction of “factories of culture”—libraries, schools, and theaters to foster the appropriate political attitudes. They converted several greenbelts to industrial development.37
With the intensification of the cold war, socialist leaders shifted “from the utilitarian to the symbolic” in Warsaw’s reconstruction. The Soviet dominance of politics, technology, and culture found full expression in the Stalin Palace of Culture and Science, built in the style of Moscow’s seven postwar Stalinist skyscrapers. This was Moscow’s skyline reproduced by Soviet architects under Lev Rudnev, not a “Polish” building. In fact, Polish communists did not want the Palace even as a press campaign praised the item and the contribution of 4,000 Russian workers, “brigades of enthusiasts,” and “Soviet friends” who worked day and night using automated technology (from the civilized USSR, of course). The Palace occupied a 60-acre site that required the razing of 100 houses and displacement of 4,000 people in a time of housing shortage.38 Rudnev and his colleagues built the Palace in 1953–55 as a “gift” from Stalin. They visited several Polish cities to study local architecture. Granted, some of the detailing and figures on the exterior represented Polish traditions and symbolized the tie between knowledge and labor. Yet the building looks Soviet—as well it should as a copy of the seven “wedding cake” Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow—in its inhuman scale, overstated neoclassical style, and grotesque waste of vital resources: 32,000 cubic meters of concrete, 50,000 tons of steel, and 34 million bricks needed for reconstruction elsewhere.
The epitome of Polish socialist realist architecture and city planning was Nowa Huta, or New Steelworks. One critic called it a site of “conspicuous production” and a good example of the “Stalinist fetish for 19th century models of industrial production.” This massive steel mill equaled prewar national steel production figures in its first year of operation. Party leaders and planners selected the site for Nowa Huta for three reasons. One was to force the pace of development of an agricultural region near the Vistula River. A second was to “proletarianize” Krakow, the Polish city that had offered the greatest political resistance to the communists. The third was to demonstrate to the world that COMECON, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance established in 1948 to integrate the economies of the socialist nations, was a superior tool of East European economic integration to the Marshall Plan in Western Europe.39 In general, however, the COMECON nations had rather autarkic economic policies until the late 1950s.
Nowa Huta was established in 1949 to support the Lenin Steelworks. The plans for Nowa Huta dated to the first postwar three-year plan in 1947. That plan focused on rebuilding the nation, so construction in Nowa Huta lagged until the six-year plan. Soviet planners were closely and directly involved in the plan during the reign of Boleslaw Bierut, a long-committed communist loyalist. Bierut first went to Moscow to be trained in the school of the Communist International in 1925. When Stalin dissolved the Polish Workers’ Party in 1938 as part of the purges, Bierut was lucky to survive. He was designated head of the new Polish Workers’ Party in 1943 and was head of the Polish provisional government from 1944 to 1947, and from 1947 through 1952 he was party head. Bierut was instrumental in the Soviet takeover of Poland by the communists.
Through COMECON, the USSR contributed $450 million to Nowa Huta. Soviet planners selected the site for Nowa Huta near the Vistula River, not in Silesia on the Gliwice Canal, but near Krakow to force the industrial development of the region and to assert control of an agricultural region of Poland that had remained psychologically and politically distant from socialism. Soviet engineers from Gipromez (the Metallurgical Design Office, who designed the Monchegorsk, Norilsk, and other arctic region metallurgical combines that operate to this day, with continued negative environmental impact) were critical in site selection.40 The goal was to make nearby Krakow a “proletarian city” by accelerating the diffusion of the working class into the region. Hardy and Rainnie claim that Nowa Huta and its steelworks were indeed “a deliberate piece of social engineering.”41 A Polish-Soviet agreement included the offer of iron ore from Ukraine. Nowa Huta required the construction of an extensive transportation infrastructure: hundreds of miles of rail, the building of a new port on the Vistula to transform the river into an artery between Silesia and Nowa Huta, and the city itself—3,000 hectares crisscrossed by hundreds of kilometers of ditches where water mains and cables would be laid, plus the building of other plants needed to complete the project: factories for brick, building materials, and so on.42 Like the streets of every socialist production city, those of Nowa Huta reflected the production ethos in their names: Six Year Plan, Lenin, December Revolution, Shock Worker, Polish-Soviet Friendship, Soviet Army, Marx, Engels, and Great Proletariat Avenues provided the framework for classical socialist realist architecture. Monumental Stalinist structures dominated every corner in Central Square. The structures were dwarfed only by the castellated gates at the entry to the steelworks.43
Planners anticipated spillover effects from Nowa Huta on the construction, machine tool, heavy machinery, rolling stock, automobile, tractor, and agricultural machinery industries “for the purpose of improving the welfare of the working population.” The promoters referred to the significance of the foundry for the nation, but especially for Krakow with its rich cultural and folk traditions “but which was impoverished in an industrial sense.” This agricultural region would change, by force of industry. The construction site “teem[ed] with workingmen in blue overalls … some of [whom] have come from the remotest corners of the country, but the core of labor crews is made up of former peasants of the Krakow distract,” Poland Today reported. “The combined efforts of their hands and their brains will build a plant and city which will stand as a symbol of victory over the misery and backwardness which once marked the life of the peasant.”44
The creation of production cities—of large-scale technological systems—had social, political, and cultural consequences that planners could not anticipate. In spite of the best efforts of political leaders, planners, scientists, and engineers, the hero cities—as a microcosm of the socialist experience—did not work out as intended. Science, including Marxist science, failed to consider the human and environmental factors adequately. Party officials and planners ran into human choices about lifestyle, reproduction, class awareness, status, and other features of human life that are hard to determine. The new towns of socialist Eastern Europe, like the new towns on which they were modeled in the USSR, attracted young people, especially peasants, those fleeing charges of being “kulaks,” and militant communists. Migration from the countryside to the city burdened social services and housing, especially since planners had not planned adequately for housing and services. The younger people naturally began to court each other and start families. This made the absence of such domestic infrastructure as stores, kindergartens, and medical clinics a terrible burden, especially since the immigrants arrived in droves precisely because of the promise of new, well-furnished apartments. In Nowa Huta as late as 1970 nearly three-quarters of the citizens were of peasant origin. This new proletariat rarely encountered an easy life. They had to learn new skills on the spot, their apartments were poorly furnished or construction was not completed, and they encountered ridicule from city residents. Their factory mates, salesgirls, people in trams, and so on, disparaged them and called them names that ridiculed their peasant origins, lack of breeding, and alleged lower level of intelligence. Nowa Huta was planned for 100,000 residents, but between 1950 and 1985 it grew to 223,000 inhabitants.45 This story of paradox—of rapid unplanned growth of a planned city—was repeated with similar disjunction between factory and home, worker and peasant throughout the socialist world.
At its height, the New Steelworks employed over 43,000 workers and produced 7 million tons of steel annually. While Europe’s largest in terms of volume, the plant was not efficient, and its construction and operation consumed “vast proportions” of Polish investment funds. These funds enabled the support of a health service, vocational training center, metallurgical training school, cultural center, sports club, stadium, and two cinemas, yet all of which were totally inadequate to meet demand. The construction of housing, stores, and social services lagged considerably as it inevitably did at every socialist construction site from Nowa Huta to Novosibirsk, from Sztalinvaros to Stalingrad and Volgodonsk, and from Dimitrovgrad to Monchegorsk. Enterprise managers throughout East Central Europe generally found it necessary to secure housing budgets from the state to erect apartment buildings and attract workers. Such state-controlled infrastructure as the town’s newspaper, Budujemy Socjalizm (Let’s Build Socialism), and a series of propaganda films reinforced Nowa Huta’s reputation as the place to live for aspiring proletarians.46
Nowa Huta, like other hero cities, was the focus of what might be called industrial ideological socialization. In the manner introduced at Magnitogorsk, Dnieprostroi, elsewhere in the USSR, and throughout the economies of East Central Europe, Nowa Huta sponsored a Stakhanovite movement. The Stakhanovite movement spread to polish mills at Huta Warszawa and Huta Katowice. Not all workers accepted the exhortation to overfulfill plans in the face of material and spiritual shortages. In Man of Marble, the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda captures a frequent response to the phenomenon: a Stakhanovite bricklayer commences a demonstration of his craft, only to discover that local workmen have heated the bricks. This scars his hands, and he can no longer demonstrate his craft. Stakhanovism did little to overcome mediocrity in industry.
In 1956 in Moscow Nikita Khrushchev delivered his so-called secret speech at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in which he condemned the murderous excesses of Stalinism, the abandonment of “Leninist norms,” and the cult of personality of Stalin. The speech led to a period called the Thaw in the USSR. The speech shocked communists the world over. At the congress Dmitri Goriunov, the editor of Komsomolskaia Pravda, took five nitroglycerin pills to stave off a heart attack. Bierut was being treated in Moscow for pneumonia; he read the speech, had a heart attack, and died.47 Throughout Eastern Europe Khrushchev’s speech triggered heightened expectations about a better life and led to confrontation with the governments. Popular resistance to Stalinism grew, and rebellions broke out. According to Neil Ascherson in The Polish August, in June 1956, 15,000 workers in Poznan at the H. Cegielski engineering plant, a major producer of engines, military equipment, and other machinery, grew so exasperated by their fruitless efforts to relax new production targets and to gain higher wages that they went out on strike. Their protests turned into a street demonstration of over 100,000 people who rioted. They engaged the security police and the army in battle, with nearly eighty people losing their lives and thousands injured and arrested. What had proletarian aesthetics wrought?
The Silver Armor of Concrete
The economic, political, and cultural choices embodied in the determination to follow the Soviet development model and embrace Soviet technological systems would have similar societal, environmental, and cultural impacts in Bulgaria, although the country was more agrarian than Poland—roughly 80 or 85 percent of the population was peasant. While the DDR had a long tradition of science and engineering, in Bulgaria it was poorly developed, and this fact necessitated dependence on Soviet expertise. The Bulgarian production city, Dimitrovgrad, immortalized in its glory days in the 1950s by socialist poets and writers,48 was named for the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who died in 1949. Dimitrov was embalmed for display in a mausoleum in Sophia, where he lay for forty years. The mausoleum, built in six days, took weeks to destroy with dynamite and bulldozers after the fall of communism. Dimitrov’s legacy lives on in the town in environmental despoliation. In “Concrete and Dreams” Peniu Penev, one of the leading popularizers of industry, praised the cement mixer for producing its “silver armor”—which also lives on in Dimitrovgrad.
Dimitrovgrad itself dates to the late 1940s when communist youths with utopian visions of a glorious, industrial socialist future gathered to create a petrochemical Magnitogorsk. They brought with them trees and shrubs to plant in the city; this greenery fails to obscure the industrial essence of the city. The communist government embraced these beginnings, immodestly seeing to it that 50,000 peasants and workers were drawn from the countryside to create a fertilizer plant (the Stalin Nitrogen Fertilizer Factory), one of the country’s largest cement works, and several thermal electric power stations that power coal, copper, and chemical industries.49 The chemical plant, still in operation, began producing nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers in 1951, later adding the production of ammonia, nitric acid, and ammonium nitrate. After the fall of communism, the facilities producing sulfuric and phosphoric acid, aniline, and nitrobenzene, the latter two carcinogenic, were shut down. In April 1990, the Ministry of Public Health declared Dimitrovgrad, along with Asenovgrad, Kurdzhali, Panagyurishte, Plovdiv, Ruse, and Vratsa, to be ecologically endangered regions and announced that residents of these regions would be given medical examinations. Forty years of proletarian aesthetics may be difficult to eliminate.50
The first postwar Bulgarian minister of industry, Petko Kunin, discussed the advantages of the Stalinist model of industrialization and electrification for transforming a backward country into a modern one. To build modern agriculture with machine tractor stations providing the technology and new industry operating on rich natural resources, two basic problems had to be solved. The first was the transformation of the country—as East European socialists were want to say—from an agrarian-industrial country with poorly developed industry and primitive agriculture into an industrial-agrarian society based on modern machinery. The second, taking a page out of the Leninist paradigm, was the electrification of the country, through the harnessing of the Danube and other rivers and the construction of massive centralized thermal power stations.51
Bulgarian communists were particularly disturbed by the backwardness and poverty of the Bulgarian countryside. The country seemed mired in the nineteenth century, with shortages of draught animals, implements, and farm machinery, let alone modern agricultural techniques. Both to extract capital from the countryside and to provide raw labor recruits for industry, they used the tried-and-true methods of collectivization and rapid training of managers, agronomists, zoologists, accountants, and other specialists. Collectivization enabled the authorities to centralize the provision of high-grade seeds, planting stock, and pedigree breeding animals. Initially, machinery came from the USSR and was then distributed to the farmers through machine tractor stations (MTSs) that, as in the Soviet Union, were also a political arm of the party. Already in 1948 seventy-one MTSs existed that promised access to nearly 3,400 tractors (vs. only thirty in 1945). Within one year (1948) they had assembled 1,100 cooperative farms out of 124,000 private farms. Dimitrov’s stated goal was a “powerful fleet of large farm machines, tractors above all, and raising yields from soil with improved soil management, irrigation, electrification and fertilizers.” Following Khrushchev’s lead at the end of the 1950s, Bulgaria created 972 megafarms (with an average size of 10,000 acres!) from the 3,290 existing ones. This meant the transformation of Bulgaria into an “industrial-agrarian country,” with the requisite drop in the rural population from 82 percent in 1948 to 24 percent of the total population by the end of the 1970s.52
The size of the industrial labor force expanded rapidly, more than threefold from 1948 to 1964, with construction the largest sector owing to its centrality to the problem of building enterprises in all industries. While in 1952 there were only 657,000 people working in industry, transport, and construction, by 1965 there were 1.5 million, and the number of people in agriculture had shrunk from 2.9 million to 1.9 million. Between 1939 and 1965, electrical energy production increased 30 times, coal production 9 times, steel 81 times, and several industries (zinc, copper, chemical fertilizers) had been created anew. Cement, of course, had an honored place, with a ninefold increase.53
Bulgarian communist leaders might have supported factory construction, but like their fraternal brothers in Poland and Hungary, they failed on the housing front. They faced housing that was “woefully inadequate,” outdated, dilapidated, and unsanitary in poorly planned towns with muddy and dusty streets. Houses were “gloomy, sunless and small.” Between 1944 and 1963, 905,000 dwellings were built, of which two-thirds were in rural areas. The architecture and planning were influenced by Soviet ideas. Bulgarian architects adopted a grand scale that was intended to glorify the ordinary working man or woman. Neoclassical buildings had a “massive allure.” At the end of the 1950s, as part of the short-lived de-Stalinization in society, including its construction projects, the authorities began to criticize the style as “undemocratic, pompous, too rigid, outmoded, unsanitary and out of place.” Bulgaria was a land of largely singlestorey housing (82%) where reinforced concrete techniques were in their infancy. To meet demand, the authorities turned to simple, mass-produced styles with little or no decoration, based on prefabricated concrete forms, yielding drab slab or tower construction growing like gray mushrooms on the outskirts of urban areas.54 A growing number of occupants filled the average dwelling. As investment dropped, construction slowed, with the result that floor space per occupant declined and kitchens and bathrooms shrank in size.
To jump-start modern agriculture and industry, the Bulgarian government determined to build a large chemical fertilizer plant. Officials selected a site near the Marbas lignite mines, with a power plant and a cement factory nearby and relatively good rail service. The new chemical city, eventually called Dimitrovgrad, would bring together nearby villages through the process of socialist industrialization. Construction commenced in 1947, with youth brigades, the forerunners of the Bulgarian Komsomol, carrying the load. Roughly 45,000 to 50,000 youths participated in the construction through 1950. By 1951 the “Stalin” Chemical Factory had opened, followed by the “Valko Chervenko” Power Plant (named after Georgi Dimitrov’s successor) and asbestos, cement, and other factories. By the 1950s the city had grown to 34,200 inhabitants (peaking in the mid-1980s at 54,000) who lived in a chemical world: Dimitrovgrad produced 50 percent of the nation’s chemical fertilizers, 32 percent of its nitrogen, 24 percent of its sulfuric acid, and 18 percent of its cement. The fraternal communists—could there be any other kind?—in Moscow had supplied loans, machines, equipment, and expertise on top of the name of the chemical plant.55
As with the other hero cities of Eastern Europe, Dimitrovgrad was a symbol of the triumph of socialism, and at the same time it was a microcosm of the problems that socialist officials, architects, planners, and citizens faced in living and toiling with joy in spite of shortages. Rapid, almost anarchic construction of massive factories and power plants with tall chimneys that belched black smoke moved ahead, with housing construction usually an afterthought. Scaffolding rose everywhere; machines whirred, banged, and crunched; and the air smelled of petrochemicals, fresh soil, rotten garbage, and curing cement. Of course, in light of rural Bulgaria’s underdeveloped industry and poorly developed labor force, the plans were not met. Workers lived in shacks that lacked basic amenities and even slept on bags filled with cement or straw. Planning and construction were “chaotic.” Housing was far away from work; urban planning lacked roads, sewage systems, shops, and transport.
Dimitrovgrad symbolized the unity of heroism and discipline, industry and science, urbanization and mobilization of the masses; the new Bulgarian man (and woman, of course) would simultaneously embrace consciously and live through social and political transformation through modern socialist technology.56 As Reid, Crowley, and others have argued, the architecture of the city was central to transformationist processes.57 Initially, the planners had envisaged a town of small houses scattered about in groups, each with its own garden, a design reminiscent of outmoded rural towns, and failing to capture the “grandiosity of socialist architecture.”58 Extensive green regions coexisted with factories and apartment buildings, although the monumentalism of the architecture indicated simultaneously both the “triumph of socialism” and the insignificance of the worker. A revised plan of the mid-1950s settled on three- and four-storey apartment blocks concentrated in neighborhoods. According to Bulgarian planners, the modern architecture would overcome the contradiction between town and industry.59 How many of the planners realized that Trotsky called in the 1920s for the establishment of smychka between town and village, between worker and peasant, through modern technology?
Having in fact alienated the peasant/worker, the political authorities had difficulties in attracting qualified workers to fill the factories, in spite of a national propaganda campaign to showcase Dimitrovgrad as a symbol of what Bulgarian socialists could accomplish in short order. Long hours, poor equipment, miserable clothing and food, even malaria (which was eradicated only in 1948) meant that workers and peasants did not rush to the site to participate. Until 1950, therefore, the construction workforce was composed of unskilled youth brigades. When others migrated to the city in search of work during forced collectivization, they were unenthusiastic and unreliable. Labor turnover was very high. The government introduced a draconian labor law to tie workers to the job; the unpopular law was revoked a year later. For their part, managers had to offer higher wages and lower norms to attract and keep workers. Gradually, the authorities introduced a system of vocational “factory schools” to improve qualifications—and worldview.60 But many Dimitrovgrad residents could not abandon their rural roots: they established small private plots within the town; they farmed gardens, built pigsties and chicken coops, and turned public parks and courtyards into gardens.61
Stalin Produces Steel in the German Democratic Republic
Let us take a tour of one more production city, Stalinstadt (later Eisenhüttenstadt) in the German Democratic Republic. While Germany’s industry was at a significantly higher level on the eve of World War II than that in the other socialist countries, the patterns of the city’s foundation and expansion, the organization of housing, and the dissatisfaction of workers were all repeated. And while East German engineering, architectural, and other technological traditions were firmly within the western, industrial, capitalist ethos (for example, the Bauhaus school), these traditions would face eradication. Following on the heels of the formation of COMECON, and just after Polish, East German, and Soviet negotiators agreed to the creation of a “peace” border, the German Democratic Republic was established. The communist government quickly formed various ministries charged with supervising the rebuilding of the economy and creating a socialist order. The Ministry of Reconstruction was empowered by a Reconstruction Act that gave the state the power to dispose of property and land, define towns and counties, and give, withdraw, or limit property rights. As in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland, a production city would be a symbol of the new state.62
Approximately half of the industrial capacity of the Soviet zone was destroyed in war, and reconstruction of the civil economy in an agricultural region cut off from its old industrial connections created challenges. The DDR generally lacked raw materials and production capacity to produce iron and steel and had little coal. Stalinstadt would operate, therefore, on Soviet iron ore and coke from Poland. Stalinstadt represented the effective incorporation of the DDR into the Soviet sphere of influence, already effectively secured through military occupation. The promulgation of Stalinist five-year plans further guaranteed Soviet influence from ideological and economic standpoints as well. The first five-year plan (1951–55) targeted the construction at Stalinstadt of a large iron and steel combine and a cement factory, as well as a town to house the workers, officials, and bureaucrats. By 1962 the population of the city was 35,000. By 1954 there were six blast furnaces; by 1968, a cold rolling milling; in 1973, a plastic laminating plant; and by 1984, another steelworks. The number of employees grew from 6,000 in 1955 to 12,700 in 1989.63 The quantity of toxic chemicals that filled the air also grew, but weren’t the workers happy with the socialist social order? And weren’t they enthused to live near massive factories?
Planners for Stalinstadt chose a site on the Oder River with access to the Oder-Spree Canal and thence into the central German waterway system, and with a number of rail connections to the rest of Germany, Poland, and Russia. They anticipated that the project would transform the agricultural region of Brandenburg into an economic powerhouse and give employment to refugees, farmers, and others. City planner Herbert Hartel envisioned the eradication of economic backwardness in seven years. The guarantee of this fact, he wrote, was that the city “was entirely conceived and executed on socialist principles.”64 These were the “Sixteen Principles of Urban Development” imported from the USSR. In spring 1950 Lothar Bolz, the minister of reconstruction, and architects Kurt Liebknecht, Walter Pisternik, and Kurt Leucht traveled to Moscow to discuss Stalin’s German city. Leucht later became manager-in-general of Stalinstadt. The goal of the Moscow trip was to reorient Berlin’s town planning to represent needs of the new socialist state, with Berlin to be a clear alternative to the West and an exemplar for other cities in the DDR. Planning took place within a debate and attack on constructivism, cosmopolitanism, and condemnation of Bauhaus traditions while promoting a socialist yet “national building tradition.” Of course, the Bauhaus was part of the German national heritage, especially among socialist architects. But in polemics ideologues referred to it as a symbol of “American imperialism.”65
How could architects develop national heritage while obeying socialist internationalism? In the 1930s Stalin had abandoned world revolution for “socialism in one country,” with its attendant autarky, xenophobia, and militarism. If planners, ideologues, and others followed the notion of socialism in one country, then national particularities could be celebrated, while an internationalism of the proletariat was no longer possible. Similarly, a universal aesthetic language was rejected as cosmopolitan. The result, again, was an architecture that was “socialist in content and national in form.” According to the sixteen principles, this meant that compact towns would be densely built, with high-rise buildings in the center of big cities. The center was defined not by trade as in bourgeois cities, but by administration and culture. A system of public spaces and hierarchies of use organized space, in theory with traffic subordinated to public life. Squares, main streets, and dominant buildings gave character. Hence, architects emphasized urbanity, not a decentralized, green utopia organized according to functional criteria, landscapes, and historical structures as was popular among “bourgeois” planners. Paradoxically, by following the sixteen principles, a city was defined by the political elite in the national government, not by local representatives or traditions.66 Was it therefore Soviet in content and socialist in form?
In November 1950, several months after construction of iron and steel mills began, the authorities selected a location for Stalinstadt. Leucht produced a design that stressed the industrial and political significance of the city: The monumental plant entrance was the culminating point on which the town’s radial and concentric streets centered. Roads, walkways, and avenues led through residential areas, all structurally oriented toward the gate. Chief designer Leucht defined the town in relation to the Stalin Iron Works, which included a town center with a large square lined by major public buildings, the biggest of which were the House of Culture and the City Hall that faced the plant’s gate at the other end. The plant became “sovereign,” with its gate, according to May, a “secular cathedral.” Work and life, plant and town were reconciled in this plan.67
No less than in other East European and Soviet cities, workers were an afterthought in Stalinstadt. Housing construction lagged significantly behind demand, and while the first apartment buildings were well intended in terms of comfort, style, and quality, those intensions had to be abandoned as workers flooded into the work site and needed housing. Yet the barracks and tents of Magnitogorsk and other Soviet production cities might not suffice under the nearby gaze of the capitalist occupiers of Germany’s western zone. The first residential buildings to go up in Stalinstadt in 1951 were simple, serial, unpretentious, economic, and modest as a stopgap measure. The architectural designs of the next complexes of flats became more opulent, modern, and spacious to suggest workers’ palaces. They were adorned with large imposing gateways. To remove pedestrian traffic from the main streets, the flats were built around inner courtyards with park-like pedestrian avenues and such public facilities as nurseries, kindergartens, day care centers, and shopping areas at important junctions.68 This had the effect of obscuring, if not ignoring, domesticity and had to be abandoned eventually for simple, inexpensive, mass-produced structures. Roland Adamson, who drove to Eisenhüttenstadt in 1962, remarked on the domination of the town by its mills: “The sudden appearance of the gargantuan J. V. Stalin Iron Smelting Plant … loom[s] up on the horizon in company with tall point blocks of residential areas and the water cooling towers of the electricity generating plant.”69 While designed so that prevailing winds carried the smoke, smog, and particulate from the plant away from residential areas, Stalinstadt residents would also live in terrible air pollution, especially when the winds failed to follow the dictates of the socialist plan. The needs of industry, not people, determined plans.
Socialist industry drew migrants like a magnet, changing the countryside rapidly from Hungary to Poland to East Germany. Stalinstadt filled with refugees, farm workers, women, and young people who came to seek employment, not necessarily to make a life. They were disappointed by the typically sluggish construction in the housing sector, since planners and builders focused on the steel mill. The workers found these buildings to be utilitarian boxes. On an early visit, party leader Walter Ulbricht recognized this problem and called for ceiling height to be raised to 3 m and the construction of four-story structures with more attractive, diverse facades. Beginning in February 1952, the government agreed that workers of the mill would be invited to discuss housing plans in detail. Yet progress remained slow: in 1952 only 360 of 905 flats were built on time, and no shops or other “social infrastructure” were completed.70 The decision to focus on heavy industry meant the absorption of the economic resources of the new state in industry, not housing. Citizens who had lived under one failed regime had strong reservations about the new state, which seemed to ignore consumer needs. The government, already hamstrung by its own decision to focus on heavy industry, found itself further restricted by the requirement to pay reparations.71
Throughout the socialist world, planners turned to industrial construction techniques based on standard concrete forms to meet housing demand. The first three housing areas built in the first five-year plan for 18,000 residents were typical of the style of proletarian aesthetics: “grey-brown blocks of flats looked very depressing even in the bright sunlight but a little relief was provided by the colourful street decoration in celebration of the Youth Congress.” The earliest buildings had a simpler design and silhouette than those built later, which have a “great deal of unnecessary ornament and complicated elevational treatments. In all these early housing areas the facades of the blocks facing the streets look like barrack buildings, very stern and forbidding.” The inner courtyards had greenery and tidy paved areas. In the fourth housing area that followed, planners used more color and terracotta to distinguish them.72 According to the official brochure of the town planning office: “The integration of giant industrial buildings and the city blocks of houses, as an expression of city planning, has become a real symbol of magnificent unity of purposeful effort and recreation, of work and play and of the unity of human existence in a socialized society. It gives architectural expression … to a society in which want and exploitation are banned forever and in which the creative power of man has opened the gateways wide to a beautiful and peaceful life.”73
In 1954 Khrushchev proclaimed the mechanization and modernization of the construction industry through the establishment of new factories that turned out concrete forms, an industrial form that quickly spread through steelworks. This would speed apartment and other construction, yet it broke with the concept of planning oriented toward national tradition in the direction of mass needs, with mass production—and the inherently proletarian aesthetics of mass production—given priority over national style.
In Stalinstadt, in order to provide housing for increasing numbers of workers to keep up with plant expansion, the planners were forced to add these box-like complexes in rows and lines, like any tract housing. Stalinstadt’s residential regions ineluctably spread toward and incorporated Furstenberg. The apartment buildings added by the 1980s (the seventh and eighth complexes) were simply industrial and noticeably worse in terms of quality. In fact, few of the central spaces and buildings of Leucht’s plan were built. The planned axis of works gate cathedral and city hall never came into being. Rather, today one sees the blast furnaces along Leninallee (Magistrale) and a broad four-lane thoroughfare between the works and the town.74
Soviet dictator Stalin died in March 1953. Many East Germans, and especially workers who detested the high production targets set by the government, hoped that an end to Stalinism might lead to better living conditions and easing of political terror. The attempt to provide joy through steel, plastics, and other industries had not worked with the masses. They increasingly rejected the pressure to meet production targets. Rebellion broke out that spread from Berlin outward. The government, under General Secretary Walter Ulbricht, hoped to placate the masses by freezing prices and making more consumer goods available but refused to lower production targets for industry and construction. Ulbricht was a Stalinist who had served in Moscow from 1937 to 1945 to escape Hitler. On June 16, workers put down their tools, walked off their jobs, and gathered at the new parade grounds at Stalin Allee in Berlin. When party officials addressed the crowds, they were shouted down and often roughed up. The demonstrations spread to most other industrial cities the next day. Like in Hungary, workers established factory committees. Who else but workers should run socialist factories? They demanded economic and political reforms and called for Ulbricht’s resignation and free elections. In Dresden the workers took over a radio station, elsewhere newspapers, and used them to demand the formation of a revolutionary government. Unable to quell the protests, the authorities relied on Soviet military units stationed in East Germany and their own police units. Over ten days of confrontations, thousands were arrested and scores were killed. Having reestablished tenuous control, and having recognized their lack of legitimacy among the masses, the party purged itself, increased surveillance, and offered modest relaxation of Stalinist economic development goals.75 The Soviets put greater control over their military and curtailed training programs for the DDR, fearing that Soviet jets and tanks might be turned against them someday. Only after the erection of the Berlin Wall, and when the DDR seemed politically stable, would the Soviets permit an autonomous East German army to develop.
Of course, the DDR was more than Stalinstadt. Its engineering tradition could be divorced from that of Western Germany only gradually. Its scientists had been involved in creating the foundations of modern rocketry, chemistry, and physics. It remained strong in a variety of fields of modern technology, from plastics to solid-state physics to optical instruments. Its scientists included specialists thrilled at the opportunity to work under socialism, even if many scientists fled the increasingly authoritarian regime until the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. A number of specialists have studied the interaction of technology and socialism in the DDR, pointing to this important history.76 Here, however, the point has been to explore “grayness” and Stalinstadt as a major example of the phenomenon. When the wall fell in 1989, East Germans rushed to embrace the technological style—and, of course, the consumer culture—of West Germany. We have since discovered the tremendous human and environmental costs not only of authoritarian rule in the East but of socialist technological style. This style was evident even in such a symbol of universal modernity as nuclear power.
Stalinist Technological Style in the Energy Sector
A number of these features of Stalinist technological style prevailed in the energy sector until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, thirty-six years after Stalin’s death. “Grayness” in energy technologies existed both in a traditional area of that industry—coal mining and hydroelectricity, the latter an intermediate region of technological advance given its larger scale in terms of site selection and components employed—and in an entirely new area, nuclear power. In each sector, planners and engineers enthusiastically embraced the Soviet template, from training programs for workers and specialists, to research institutes that produced plans that reflected supreme confidence of the ability to rework nature so that it too operated according to plan, and to the machines, turbogenerators, and even mass-produced reactors. Because of the high cost of research and development in nuclear technology, it would have made sense for East European nations to turn to the USSR more completely in this area than in coal or hydroelectricity, but each sector rushed headlong into rudimentary designs; standardization of approaches, machinery, and equipment; and poor treatment of workers at each site.
In coal, in spite of a vision of highly productive workers pulling coal out of seams with modern pneumatic machinery, reliance on Soviet blueprints meant a low level of mechanization and emphasis on labor inputs, poor working and living conditions for the workers, extensive environmental degradation that resulted from operation of power generation systems (fossil fuel boilers, hydroelectric stations, and so on), and designs that risked sacrifices in safety for reductions in capital costs. Take, for example, the Polish bituminous coal mining industry in Silesia. Polish communist planners oversaw the nationalization of the coal industry and fostered rapid growth in the mining labor force, yet they failed to meet the targets of a three-year plan adopted in late 1946. Severe coal scarcities resulted, in part because of demand triggered by the industrialization drive and urbanization, plus coal exports at favorable prices to the USSR in a strange kind of socialist exploitation. While output per shift exceeded pre–World War II levels by 1948, it dropped back to those levels by 1953, in part owing to poor mechanization, even though the labor force continued to expand.77
Outdated techniques included long-wall and room-and-pillar methods with hydraulic backfilling underground, strip mining in its infancy, shortages of cutting machines and pneumatic hammers, and main haulage ways that lacked mechanized equipment. Added to this, productivity of labor in the coal industry was low because of “notoriously poor living conditions and housing, added to very low safety standards, [which] discourage the needed influx of new workers and result in a high rate of labor turnover.” When the Poles sought modern equipment, they fell prey to premature obsolescence by relying on the USSR. They manufactured KW-52 and KW-57 undercutting and loading machines, copies of the Soviet-made Donbas combine. According to one observer, the machines were considered to be impressive by virtue of their size alone, but this hid the reality of their inferior quality and inefficiency; they were adapted from a Soviet model itself outdated as soon as it appeared in the 1930s. In fact, they wasted tight investment capital on the KWs in a sector of the economy “where elementary mining equipment is scarce, and repair facilities highly inadequate.”78
With the construction of the Lenin Works in Nowa Huta and the expansion of the Kosciuszko mill and the Bierut Works in Czestochowa during the six-year plan of 1950–55, targets were fulfilled 90 percent for pig iron and 95 percent for steel and rolled products. The percentage of sheet in total production would be doubled by 1960 owing to production from the continuous wide-strip mill of the Lenin Works. In spite of all this investment and expansion, or perhaps because of it, the coefficients of productivity (average useful capacity, coefficient of utilization, dry coke consumption, and so on) were “mediocre by modern standards,” with Soviet metallurgists doing better at their plants in the mid-1930s than Poles in 1955. Owing to low quality of iron ore charged, low capital, and low labor productivity, the average Polish blast furnace daily produced in the late 1950s only roughly 30 percent that of the average in the United States.79
Toward the end of modernization of coal mines, Polish engineers established thirty-five massive institutes that employed a total of 11,684 people, although only 850 of them were senior researchers (less than 1% of all personnel). These researchers were “blazing the trail in mining engineering.” The first cutterloader went into operation in 1945, and by 1972 there were 601 of them and ninety-four plows, most Polish built. (Soviet engineers and technology were crucial in the initial stages of mechanization.) While this may seem like great progress, keep in mind that Poland operated 544 mines in 1975. They had begun a transition to intensification of larger pits, for example, the Pniowek pit, which had a daily output of 15,000 tons of coal. All of this meant, in other words, that the massive socialist mine relied on raw human labor.80
The Soviet technological imprint flowed more directly into hydroelectricity and nuclear power. Although the hydroelectric potential of rivers in East Central Europe did not lend itself to the massive nature transformation projects characteristic of the former USSR, the Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and others organized hydrology institutes modeled on those in the Soviet Union to train engineers to turn what they considered wasted or useless land into productive land through hydroelectricity, irrigation, and aquaculture. In Hungary they sought radical transformation of the Tisza River and Hortobagy Plain through irrigation, reclamation, and fisheries projects. Polish engineers also aggressively pursued a series of river basin transformation projects.81 At the peak of its nature transformation efforts at the beginning of the 1980s, the Polish “Hydroprojekt” institute maintained twenty-eight design teams with a total of over 1,000 employees. The engineers’ scope of interest included water management, hydraulic engineering, steel construction, mechanical equipment, electrical installations and power generation, automation, water supply, wastewater treatment, architecture, and land development. Hydroprojekt followed the example set by the Zhuk Gidroproekt Institute in Moscow, itself an outgrowth of such nature transformation projects as the Belomor (Baltic–White Sea) Canal, the Moscow Canal, and others that relied on gulag slave labor. The projects, which engineers approached with great enthusiasm, turned out to be costly from environmental and social perspectives.
The human sources of environmental degradation and ecosystem change in Polish river basins were well known to officials and scientists, including how displacement of population from the Wisłoka River drainage area contributed to increased annual stream flow, as well as the impact of urbanization and industrialization on the Rawa River runoff in the Upper Silesian industrial region.82 Yet they pushed onward in support of industrialization. One such project was the construction of a melioration canal connecting the Wieprz and Krzna Rivers to eliminate summer water shortages in the area of Polesie Lubelskie; by 1985, 40,000 hectares had been prepared for irrigation and eleven impoundments had been built. Yet the withdrawals from the Wieprz River, an average of 25 percent of average flow, were not well controlled and had an impact on the river ecology itself.83
The peaceful Soviet atom also found a home in socialist Eastern Europe. As part of the major propaganda effort to glorify peaceful programs in nuclear power, the USSR assisted the socialist nations in establishing extensive research, development, and energy production programs. The USSR promoted the military atom in East Central Europe through the Warsaw Pact Treaty organization. It promoted the peaceful atom through COMECON and the establishment of nuclear physics training and research institutes in each country. It also provided the opportunity for specialists to work in Soviet facilities, in particular at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, where fraternal physicists gathered to do work on nuclear, high-energy, and other areas of physics. Ultimately, the USSR exported both nuclear research and powergenerating reactors to Eastern Europe.
Peaceful nuclear programs in Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic (as part of Germany proper), and Czechoslovakia had prewar roots, while Bulgarian and Romanian scientists commenced research from a more embryonic stage. All programs received a significant boost from cooperation with the USSR. For the leaders in Eastern Europe, just as for Soviet leaders, modern science and technology were keys to building socialism. Scientists and engineers were considered naturally more reliable than other intellectuals, especially more so than humanists trained under the old regimes. No less than mining, metallurgy, hydrology, agronomy, or chemistry, nuclear science and technology would bring modernity to formerly agrarian societies. Nuclear research in Eastern European programs accelerated in the 1950s, especially after U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations in March 1953 calling for “Atoms for Peace.” In his speech, Eisenhower sought to diffuse the growing tension of the cold war by urging the UN to establish an organization with international control over nuclear materials and knowledge in support of peaceful applications in agriculture, industry, medicine, and energy. Eisenhower’s call led to the formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which successfully operates to this day in promoting peaceful nuclear programs. Together with the Americans, the leaders of the Soviet Union and East European nations recognized the opportunity to use peaceful nuclear programs as a cold war propaganda tool. They quickly organized joint research efforts and expanded peaceful directions of study in order to demonstrate that they used the atom in the name of peace, not for military purposes as in America.
The creation of JINR was the result of domestic and international forces. JINR was built on the foundation of the Institute of Nuclear Problems, itself organized in Dubna in the late 1940s to contribute to the cold war nuclear enterprise. Another impetus was the creation of COMECON, founded in 1949 by the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. COMECON was intended to ensure healthy trade among the socialist nations and to provide an alternative to the Marshall Plan, adopted by the United States to help rebuild Western Europe and to prevent socialism from spreading further. COMECON had a permanent nuclear commission called ATOMENERGO. The founding of JINR occurred after Vladimir Veksler, then of the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, conceived of the notion of the synchrophasotron to reach higher particle energies. To build a truly powerful—and much larger—machine, Veksler and his team moved to Dubna. Representatives of eleven states, mostly from Eastern Europe, then gathered in Moscow in March 1956 to sign an agreement to work at JINR in support of Atoms for Peace programs. From that time, East European physicists frequently journeyed to the JINR for fellowships, short-term research trips, and long-term collaboration. Scores of Czech, Hungarian, Polish, East German, Bulgarian, and other scientists worked together for nearly four decades on a variety of projects.
At home, the East European nuclear enterprise expanded rapidly, especially in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, in terms of both institutes and researchers. Simultaneously, universities and Academy of Science institutes expanded nuclear physics training programs on the basis of Soviet programs and mass-produced equipment. At many institutes physicists installed U-120, U-240, and Van de Graaff particle accelerators built at the Efrimov Institute of Electrophysical Apparatus located outside of Leningrad; the Efrimov Institute built standard equipment for reactors and fusion research equipment as well. The East European research programs were vital, indigenous, and extensive, but they were tied intellectually and materially to Soviet technology.
For example, the Institute of Nuclear Physics was established in Krakow, Poland, in 1955. Researchers, under the leadership of Henryk Niewodniczanski, founder and first director of the institute, employed a U-120 Cyclotron, built in 1958, for various research projects. The Central Research Institute for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Központi Fizikai Kutató Intézet or KFKI), founded in 1950, grew into one of the leading European institutes of research on atomic physics, nuclear physics, cosmic rays, electromagnetic waves, spectroscopy, and radiology, expanding research after the Hungarian revolution into nuclear chemistry, electronics, reactor research, and solid-state physics using a Soviet research reactor.
Nuclear power logically followed research and development. While the climate of East European nations is not as harsh as that of many regions of the USSR, other factors played into the decision to build a series of nuclear power stations in the region. One was the absence of fossil fuel resources of high calorific value and low pollutants. A second was the need to transport oil, coal, and natural gas long distances—primarily from the USSR, which served as the major supplier of energy resources. Indeed, by Soviet standards, the countries of East Central Europe were energy poor. Third, as part of COMECON integration programs, nuclear power became almost inevitable. The leaders of East European nations indeed welcomed nuclear power as a sign of modernity and progress as they entered the second half of the twentieth century. While Czechoslovakia manufactured various parts and components for VVER reactors, and East Germany and Hungary contributed equipment, too, the lion’s share of the technology came from the USSR in the form of the complete nuclear template.84
One technology was the pressurized water reactor, known by the Soviet acronym as VVER reactors, in 440 and later 1,000 megawatt (MW) units. The first generation was quite “gray”; those built in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary did not employ containment vessels. This meant that, had there been an accident, radioactive material could have been spread far and wide. Later, engineers built VVERs with containment vessels but sought to keep costs down through the serial production of eight 1,000 MW units annually at the Atommash factory in Volgodonsk, USSR. (Except for the DDR, most of the VVER reactors continue to operate in Eastern Europe, but with significant retrofitting of western safety, monitoring, and control equipment.)85 Hungary had plans to buy ten units from Atommash that would have been floated through the Volga-Don Canal (itself a typically Stalinist technology), down the Don River to the Black Sea, and then up the Danube to Paks for a total capacity of 10,000 or even 12,000 MWe. At the height of their nuclear enthusiasm in the early 1970s, the countries of Eastern Europe forecast total capacity of 25,000 MW in 1985 and 177,000 MW by 2000,86 that is, over 200 reactors.
Bulgarian leaders welcomed nuclear power to demonstrate that the former “agro-industrial” country had become “industrial.” The nation built the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Station on the Danube River in northeast Bulgaria near the Romanian border. In East Germany the Central Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf opened in 1956, and a research reactor commenced operation the following year. The first East German power reactor, the 70 MWe Rheinsberg PWR, was connected to the grid in 1966 and operated until 1990. The German Democratic Republic also had four VVER-440 reactors at the Greifswald nuclear power station dating to the 1970s, as well as two VVER-440 reactors at Magdeburg. In 1976 one of the Greifswald reactors nearly melted down owing to failure of a safety system. In 1974 Poland opted for four Soviet reactors, but the political crisis brought about by Solidarity and the breakup of the USSR put those nuclear dreams to an end. Under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania pursued a joint program with Canada to build the latter’s CANDU natural uranium reactors. The regime discussed far-fetched plans to build as many as twenty CANDU reactors at ~650 MWe each. Taking a page out of Stalinist practices, Ceausescu ordered forced labor to work at the Cernavoda nuclear station site. Poor workmanship and faulty construction were widespread. When Ceausescu was killed in the revolution of 1989, the nuclear infrastructure of Romania disappeared with him, and only one reactor was completed.
Czechoslovakia has a long independent history of nuclear research that predated the Soviet takeover. Beginning in 1958, Czechoslovak scientists built a gas-cooled, heavy-water-moderated reactor, which had a spotty fifteen-year history and several unfortunate accidents, including one that killed two people during a refueling accident and several others that released large amounts of radioactive material. Under socialist power, before separation into the independent countries of the Czech and Slovak Republics, leaders decided to build nuclear power stations at Bohunice and Mochovce, also based on Soviet VVER models and all built largely by the Skoda Works at Plzen. The Czech Republic has four VVER-440/213 reactors in operation at Dukovany that came on line in 1985, 1986, and 1987; two VVER-1000 reactors at Temelin; and four VVER-440 reactors at Bohunice.
A second Soviet reactor is the notorious “RBMK” Chernobyl-type. Lithuanian communist leaders joyously approved the construction of two 1,500 MW units—50 percent larger than those at Chernobyl—in Visaginas at the Ignalina station. As with the VVER, this facility uses standard components, pumps, turbogenerators, and other equipment wherever possible to keep costs down, and engineers prematurely embraced those standard components. The RBMK has the advantage of on-line refueling, but the impossibility of containment. In fact, over 1,500 concrete plugs rest in the top of the reactor vessel to enable yearround refueling. Further, the RMBK is inherently unstable at low power and produces plutonium that can be used to make simple fission bombs. (As a precondition of entering the European Union, Lithuania has agreed to shut Ignalina by 2010.)87
Soviet-style planners imposed the Ignalina station on the nation with typical fervor. Electrical energy production stimulated industrial growth, and vice versa. Nuclear power construction stimulated more reactor construction. While at Chernobyl they dreamily envisaged ten reactors, and at Paks in Hungary up to ten others, in tiny Lithuania they planned a second large power station at Pavilosta on the Baltic Sea to ensure copious amounts of cooling water while not having to build expensive concrete cooling towers. The output of the huge Ignalina station represented an 80 percent increase over the total output of the entire nation. It enabled Lithuania to become an energy exporter, since domestic demand was nowhere near the amount produced. But Soviet planners were not satisfied. They decided to build a 1,600 MW pumped storage station at Kaisiadorys at the junction of the Streva River and Kaunas Reservoir; in periods of low demand, excess electricity will be used to pump water to an upper reservoir, and in periods of high demand, the water will be released through powerful turbogenerators. In keeping with the belief that technology was inherently safe, the construction companies for these massive hydro- and nuclear power stations employed young people with little previous training or experience, whose work was often judged “unacceptable.” At Ignalina, again to save money, they designed the station without water effluent cooling towers. The station, built on the shores of Lake Druksiai, drew 300 to 400 cubic meters of water per second, or roughly 30 million cubic meters daily (perhaps 6% to 7% of the lake’s volume), and dumped heated water back into the lake, contributing significantly to thermal pollution, evaporation, and ecological degradation.88 Pity the poor fish.
Like other Soviet technologies, Ignalina was a tool of Russification. High out-migration marked rural regions during the postwar Soviet industrialization campaigns. Over ten years during construction, the percentage of Lithuanians in the surrounding region declined from 79.0 to 64.3 percent, while the percentage of Russians increased from 9.0 to 19.7 percent. The town of Visaginas, built to house plant workers and their families, was a typical Soviet settlement, designed by a group of Russian federation architects whose designs essentially rejected the notion of “socialist in content, national in form,” and inhabited by Russian nuclear families—in all meanings of the term. Engineers came from other reactor facilities in the USSR. City planners chose a confluence of apartment bloc styles and sought to preserve the lakes and parks in the region, but the demands of the reactor predominated. Representatives of forty different ethnic groups joined to build the city and the reactors; many of them intermarried, with the keys to the first completed apartment going to a Lithuanian-Belorussian couple. But generally, the drawing together of different nationalities did not take place. The immigrants did not know Lithuanian customs, language, or history; the Lithuanian government succeeded only after the breakup of the USSR to require Lithuanian to be the language of operation of the nuclear power station.89
Proletarian Aesthetics Reprised
The workers who lived and toiled in the production cities of Eastern Europe lived a gray life of hard work and few comforts at home. Their lives mirrored the Spartan life of workers and peasants throughout the socialist world. Beyond the politics of the effort to create a strong state, ensure ideological conformity, and eliminate the remnants of capitalism, a major reason for this was the embrace of a peculiar technological style, itself the result of cost, ideological, and other considerations. The technology of concrete—and the fetishization of mass production—determined designs, rather than designs determining demand for concrete. This was most clear in the wide dissemination of the technique of large-panel construction. In the mid-1950s, as part of a drive to mechanize and automate all aspects of production, the Soviets and their fraternal brothers in Eastern Europe pursued the manufacture of prefabricated concrete forms. The ubiquitous large panel found myriad applications in housing, construction, and road building. Panels could be used as ceilings, floors, walls, and roads (when laid end to end); as walls with windows or door holes; or as sidewalks, steps, and light and power line standards. By the early 1960s, large-panel construction techniques had spread from East Germany and Hungary through Poland and Romania all the way to Siberia and back, often by East Europeans who had been “placed” in the Soviet system after the war and then returned home.90
One source of the techniques was the “huge and feverish process” of rebuilding that took place after the war. In the USSR, between 1946 and 1950 (the fourth five-year plan) Soviet workers built or rebuilt 100 million square meters of living space, and a similar amount was proposed for 1951 to 1955. Yet these statistics give little sense of what, by whom, by what means, and for whom the flats were built, or the fact that millions and millions of people lived in tents, barracks, communal apartments, and dug-out earthen homes. Usually only party, economic, and intellectual elites gained apartments in new buildings. P. I. Kotovodov’s Socialist Competition of Workers of Stalingrad and Minsk (published in Minsk in 1950, in Russian) provided a sense of the apartment construction process, a process repeated in East Central Europe. The Central Administration for Construction of Minsk, Glavminskstroi, promoted a contest to build more quickly, better, and cheaper with the Stalingradstroi construction company. Glavminskstroi consisted of several poorly equipped building trusts; for example, Trust No. 1 had sixty-one lorries. The competition encouraged greater use of mechanized processes and “improved methods of bricklaying.” Stakhanovites led the way, training young workers to follow their example. One Gromov, a plasterer in Minsk, wrote to the Stakhanovites in Stalingrad, “When we signed our contest [obligations] I had three trainee plasterers under me. This year I have trained six.” Lectures, demonstrations, press, posters, and activism spread modern construction methods among the rank and file.91 It would have been nice to have cranes and pile drivers.
Large-panel construction techniques determined that a few basic designs would suffice to meet burgeoning demand. Just as in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s as urban centers swelled during the industrialization drive, so throughout Eastern Europe cities grew rapidly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Planners’ preferences in a centrally planned economy minimized consumer input into aesthetic considerations. And, to build housing rapidly, why not use inexpensive, standardized designs based on prefabricated forms that could be assembled rapidly by unskilled and illiterate workers into dwellings? This housing was proletarian in its minimal space, threadbare appointments, and shared bathrooms. It frequently incorporated the “collectivist” ethos in communal kitchens, child care facilities, and rooms for workers’ clubs, but these were introduced more often to cut costs than to uphold a proletarian social ideal. The apartments and clubrooms, like the factory itself, also had a political function as the appropriate setting for the Communist Party to employ various media (radio, film, mass publications, and meetings) to educate the masses about the glories of communist construction.
To say that socialist cities resembled one another is an understatement. There were but a handful of basic apartment building styles in each country. The Soviet film Ironiia sud’by ili s legkim parom! captures that oneness of Soviet architectural style. The main character gets drunk and falls asleep. His friends stick him on an airplane. He awakes in Leningrad, but he thinks he is in Moscow and heads home. He ends up in a woman’s apartment—he has used his key to gain entrance, and it works. He comments, “Street names are not very inventive. Which city doesn’t have its First Garden street, its Second Country street, its Third Factory street? Staircases are all the same, painted with a standard, pleasant color. Standard flats are decorated with standard furniture, and the indistinguishable doors have standard locks.” Upon waking from his drunk, he informs her that she is in the wrong apartment.92
Wherever they are introduced, such technologies as roads, factories, and apartment buildings both reflect and influence social choices. Or, to put it simply, technology is a social force. The decision to employ proletarian aesthetics in industry and housing simultaneously had implications for employment, quality of life, and commuting issues. First, in spite of egalitarian intentions, there were disparities in the quality of housing by region. Cities like Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague were the focus of intensive construction activity that could barely keep pace with the rebuilding effort and the growing migration of peasants into cities. Smaller cities had few resources for housing. This forced municipalities and construction trusts to build lower quality, overcrowded, and nondescript apartments. Regional disparities, like those of class, resulted from political and social concerns, not some objective determination of the one best way to allocate all resources equitably. One could achieve maximum economic growth for the entire country if the goal were to equalize output per capita. But that goal ran in the face of decisions to direct resources to areas of high resource productivity. And, of course, since a Marxist urban industrial ideology held sway, the cities received the lion’s share of investment while the countryside suffered.
Second, enterprises that were ordered to expand industrial production had to attract new employees; it was easier for them to attract workers if they could offer subsidized apartments in buildings they erected and owned. The incentive therefore was speed in construction of barely functional apartments that were still better than barracks and tents that existed at many early construction sites. Yet the failure to build sufficient numbers of flats of more than two rooms meant that larger families were crammed uncomfortably into tiny living spaces. The absence of multiroom flats discouraged many families from having more children. And, of course, as noted earlier, members of the new administrative and technical elites often jumped lines in anticipation of new apartments opening up.93 Rarely did the authorities order larger apartments to be built or the production of more consumer goods to make daily life more comfortable. Proletarian aesthetics predominated because housing, with the exception of Hungary, was largely allocated administratively according to nonmarket preferences. While new housing was available to most people at low rents in theory, bureaucratic procedures and intervention of one’s place of work were required to secure an apartment.94
Stalinist Technology in East Central Europe
What had Stalin and his East European colleagues wrought? The large-scale technological systems that were deployed in East Central Europe reflected the crucial juncture of state power and technological choice, as well as political choices concerning distribution of goods, services, and natural resources that privileged industry over housing, steel over medicine, and cement over vegetables. That much is clear. Yet in what ways did a strong reliance on Soviet engineering practices also influence, shape, or constrain the technological choices of the other socialist nations of Eastern Europe? Owing to its military might, its central involvement in the politics of Eastern Europe, and its prevailing direct and indirect control over technological choices in its client states, the USSR was able to exert considerable influence over technological style that was manifested in a variety of ways and over a variety of technologies.
Each socialist nation had its own technological style as a result of national political, economic, and social differences. Engineering designs reflected not only natural constraints but political realities and choices. Consider, for example, Hecht’s concept of “technopolitics” to explain how two different reactor designs developed in postwar France.95 Physical constants place limits on technological choice. In construction, for example, strength, stability, reliability, weight, density, and other factors are universal values that limit choice of materials and how they are employed and constitute a complex decision matrix that includes cost, safety, stability, and so on. Yet political, economic, and ideological desiderata also shape technological choice. Soviet and East European planners seem to have had a particular fascination with mass production, with concrete, and with the design of more rudimentary technologies, with minimal attention to environmental concerns or worker safety. The result is precisely the “grayness” I have attempted to describe, even if we find only slightly different shades of gray. This discussion of hero cities indicates the importance of the interaction of local, national, and geopolitical (read Soviet) factors in the determination of those shades. By shades of gray I mean how these factors shaped technological systems, and how they differed from country to country. One could also find shades of gray in various energy, metallurgical, construction, and other technological systems that arose in Eastern Europe under socialism. Hero cities seem ready-made for this investigation: the Soviet impact is prominent in the planning process, the organization and layout of the cities, the architecture, and the training, employment, housing, feeding, and education of all residents. The hero cities also present compact cases from the points of view of history, geography, and sources for their study.
The new socialist regimes in East Central Europe turned to rapid industrialization reminiscent of the Soviet experience. After the end of World War II, with the installation of socialist governments, these nations—Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic—embarked on rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. Leaders, planners, and engineers pursued industrialization through large-scale technological systems—new coal mines and steel mills, electrical energy generating plants, and entire production cities. In spite of the rhetoric of the glories of socialism, workers lived and toiled in dangerous conditions, factories polluted extensively, and housing was uninspired. The nations adjusted their programs in one way or the other, tinkering with production targets, factory blueprints, and urban layouts, but they seem to have learned little about the human and environmental costs of the Stalinist program, or learned about them later and still did relatively little to alter investment policies, pollution regulation practices, or industrial designs. Perhaps the political goal of establishing Marxian societies that were at least in a rhetorical sense “proletarian” gave little leeway to political leaders, planners, or engineers in their effort to transform their societies from capitalist, highly agrarian ones to socialist industrial ones.
How did economic desiderata contribute to technological style in East Central Europe? Three major forces seem to be at work here. The first was the requisite centrally planned economy with its alleged hyper-rational planning of production and distribution of resources. Paradoxically, instead of rationality, planners—and consumers—encountered bottlenecks at every step that went beyond simple explanations of resource constraints and geography. Instead of having pride in labor, the result was low-quality goods and services of an often irrational mix that left proletarian consumers dissatisfied and facing shortages. The absence of flexibility in the planning system contributed to decisions to adopt standard, rudimentary systems. Managers and engineers sought to take advantage of modern automated systems and mass-produced components to keep costs down. But in East Central Europe all of this waylaid innovation, as did pressures on engineers and managers to meet targets that had the rule of law. Engineers and managers therefore found it safer to choose simple designs and then avoided innovations precisely to ensure that they received performance bonuses and avoided punishment for failure.
Another economic factor was a fascination with mass production that rivaled Fordist attitudes in the West. I sense the roots of this fascination in the effort to be egalitarian (no worker should have it better than another worker, no concrete should be better than any other), to cut costs, and to take advantage of modern production processes, as well as fear of managers and engineers of missing targets. But we must also consider the importance of the example of technology in leading capitalist countries, in particular in the United States, and ask whether East European leaders shared the view of leading Soviet politicians that the assembly line would liberate industrial and agricultural workers. The Fordist assembly line is deskilling and inhumane, a fact that workers under socialism and capitalism both recognized long before their bosses did. Or, perhaps socialist bosses indeed understood that they desired socialist workers to be cogs in a machine, not independent thinkers.
The emphasis on heavy industry and on rebuilding as rapidly as possible from the devastation of World War II also contributed to gray technological style. Rebuilding from the war devastation contributed to the decision to adopt streamlined projects and ultimately to employ industrial mass production construction techniques rather than other more aesthetically pleasing and comprehensive designs. In what ways were economic choices, paradoxically, resource intensive or inefficient, while their adherents claimed them to be rational and efficient? How did autarkic economic relations contribute to technological choice? No doubt, cold war ideological competition between the United States and the USSR, between NATO and the Warsaw pact, also played a role, but we need to consider this further. More concretely, what was the relationship among top party officials, city and plant managers, and engineers concerning all of these issues? In what ways did ideological mandates influence technological choice and shape industrial designs? How did they shape the training of scientists and engineers? What was the impact on universities and research institutes? Which presocialist indigenous engineering traditions, national institutions, and styles found expression in the newly socialist countries? The notions of grayness and proletarian aesthetics go some way toward answering these questions.
Ideology also contributed to the phenomenon of gigantomania at the urban centers and factories that served them. Armed with simple tools and exposed to the elements, tens of thousands of peasants cum workers toiled not only to build the factory or urban center or canal at hand, not only to create a site of great ideological significance for indicating the glories of state socialism, but also to master the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, atheism, central planning, selflessness, collectivism, and allegiance to the party and its five-year plans. At hero projects throughout Eastern Europe divisions of workers were assembled whose every movement was scrutinized to ensure that they remained in lockstep with plans. They built factories, government buildings, and edifices that glorified state power.
Large-scale technological systems, as Thomas Hughes and others have argued, are not merely artifacts, but a series of interrelated processes and technologies and the governmental, scientific, engineering, communications, and financial institutions that contribute to innovation and diffusion.96 Connected with engineering practices—and the technologies in which they were embodied—are important economic, social, and ideological considerations. This discussion of hero cities enables us to see that they are, somewhat tautologically, a huge agglomeration of technologies. Hence, gigantomania not only concerns the search for economies of scale, but grows out of ideological and political considerations. These include the desire to demonstrate state power through the construction of important artifacts, for example, various nations’ space programs or hydroelectric power stations; consider Soviet and American competition over the Kuibyshev and Grand Coulee dams or the race to be the first to the moon. In the socialist nations, grayness paradoxically grew out of a conscious desire to compete with the West, to demonstrate the superiority of socialist technological systems, and to gather, train, and transform citizens into conscious proletarians efficiently.
Stalinism in its economic, political, and technological forms had a clear impact beyond Soviet borders. A number of scholars have written about ideological interference in science and engineering; about the persistent impact of the administrative, financial, and political controls over science and engineering in the decades after Stalin’s death; and about the technological style that prevailed in industry in the USSR owing to resource constraints, economic desiderata, and other factors. Yet several issues remain incompletely explored, especially in socialist Eastern Europe, and especially concerning the history of science and technology. What of the Stalinist legacy in hero cities, in technological design, in engineering education, and in social policy? After Stalin’s death, and especially after worker rebellions in the DDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary during the next three years over the inappropriateness of the Stalinist development model, communist leaders were compelled to reconsider investment priorities and the place of big technological systems in their plans. Yet the physical structures remained, as did the political, economic, and engineering decisions they reflected, and they would have an influence on the quality of life and the environment in East Central Europe into the twenty-first century.
Mikhail Grigorevich Rojter (1916–93), “Concrete Pourers at the Bratsk Hydropower Station,” 1960, etching. Socialist workers, without helmets or steel-toed shoes, poured concrete from one end of the socialist world to the other, from the Bratsk station on the Angara River in Siberia to North Korea, where it seemed it was easier to find concrete than food. Courtesy of the Allan Gamborg Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
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