Iron Curtain (63 page)

Many did cooperate. Under the slogan “Beauty is for every day and for everybody” Telakowska’s bureau commissioned and purchased dozens of strikingly original designs for fabrics, furniture, cutlery, dishes, crockery, ceramics, jewelry, and clothes.
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She sent one group of artists to a glass factory in Szklarska Poręba and another group to a glass factory in
Silesia. Both were meant to cooperate with the workers and the management in order to create attractive, popular designs that could be mass-produced. One group created a series of glasses, etched with calligraphy in a prewar style. The other used older antique glass for inspiration. Telakowska also persuaded a prominent Polish sculptor,
Antoni Kenar, to return to Poland from exile in Paris
in order to organize a woodcarving workshop, and she sent designers to the Carpathian Mountains, where they worked with women weavers, helping them to update their designs. At one point, her bureau held a competition to encourage peasant carvers to design new wooden “folk” toys, prompting one art critic to exult that “a new type of toy-making is being born, one which breaks decisively away from the objects that, in the 1920s, persuaded children to play at ‘war.’ ”
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In her enthusiasm, and in her positivism, Telakowska was not alone. The powerful desire to rebuild their ruined country was the one sentiment that unified Poles of all political persuasions in the immediate postwar years, and nowhere more acutely than in Warsaw, a city so profoundly destroyed that many believed it should be left in ruins as a monument to war. The writer
Kazimierz Brandys remembered feeling that “this must not be touched. Let it stand, just as it is … we, who had loved that city, we wanted at that time to love its scattered bricks.”
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Others thought reconstruction impractical or impossible.
Alexander Jackowski, a young officer at the time (and later an eminent historian of Polish folk art), said simply that “I didn’t believe it could be rebuilt in my lifetime.”
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Within days of the war’s end, the city’s former inhabitants had nevertheless begun to clear the streets and volunteer their services as builders and engineers. Such was the magnetic pull of Warsaw that as soon as it was possible, people began squatting in the rubble, making do with whatever was left of their ruined homes. The communist leadership leapt to attach itself to this outpouring of energy and sentiment: in the reconstruction of Warsaw, they saw a way to become, if not popular, then at least grudgingly admired. If nothing else, they could make common cause with people like Telakowska and Urbanowicz, who were enthusiastic about the restoration of the country’s artistic and architectural heritage, even if they didn’t sign on to the entire communist project. In February 1945, the provisional government created the Bureau for the Reconstruction of the Capital (Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy, or BOS) and appointed Józef Sigalin, an architect who had spent the war years in the USSR, to take charge.

Immediately, Signalia was deluged with advice. Some wanted to wipe away the ruins and construct a shiny, modern city of steel and glass, in the then-popular International Style. At the Polish School of Architecture,
founded by exiles at the University of Liverpool during the war, a group of young Polish architects created a series of architectural drawings tbat looked no different from those created at the time by their British colleagues.
Jerzy Piatkiewicz reimagined the medieval section of Warsaw, the Old Town, keeping the street plan but substituting glass-fronted modern buildings for the baroque façades. Others proposed concrete apartment blocks and massive buildings in the style that came to be known in Britain as “brutalism.”
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From the very beginning, popular sentiment went in precisely the opposite direction. Most of the public wanted the old Warsaw back, and many architects did too. “Our sense of responsibility to future generations obliges us to rebuild that which was destroyed” is how one put it.
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In particular, the
reconstructionists argued that the oldest parts of the city—its medieval, baroque, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century buildings—should be put back exactly as they had been, brick for brick, so that the country’s architectural heritage would not disappear forever.

By 1949, a third strand of thinking had developed too. Neither functional glass boxes nor strict reconstruction fit very well into the Soviet Union’s new push for
socialist realism, after all. Nor did either option entirely satisfy the Polish communists’ mania for reeducation or reflect their belief in environmental determinism: if people could be subtly influenced by their surroundings, then Warsaw’s architects had a responsibility to help create the new reality, the spaces within which
Homo sovieticus
would eventually live and work. In a major speech on the reconstruction of Warsaw in 1949, Bolesław Bierut declared, “The new Warsaw cannot be a copy of the old, it cannot simply repeat, slightly altered, the hodgepodge of the capitalist class’s private interests which constituted the city before the war … the New Warsaw must become the capital of a socialist state.”
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But at the time, there was only one city that qualified as a true “capital of a socialist state.” And thus did much of the official 1949 plan for the reconstruction of Warsaw come to derive directly and almost slavishly from the architecture of Moscow.

In the period of High Stalinism, Soviet architecture was deliberately designed to impress and intimidate. Offices, public monuments, and apartment blocks in Moscow were massive, heavy, and ornate. Streets were impressively wide but difficult to cross. Public squares were broad, flat, and covered in concrete, perfectly suited to mass demonstrations though monotonous to behold. Distances between buildings were great, and pedestrians had to rely on trams or buses. Because their design was supposed to be “comprehensible”
to the workers who would inhabit these palatial structures, architects relied heavily on familiar, even clichéd classical elements such as columns, balconies, and archways.
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Soviet city design was, in other words, totally unsuited to Warsaw, a city that had been designed for horses and pedestrians in an era before the automobile, and whose plan had revolved around churches and shopping streets. Squares and parks had been created for leisure, not for mass demonstrations, and they had been filled with grass, not concrete. Nevertheless, the 1949 designs for Warsaw are classic examples of High Stalinist socialist realism: the Ministry of Agriculture with its two layers of columns, the wide boulevards designed for May Day parades, the decorative concrete lampposts and balconies.
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Though these designs did not derive from any existing Polish tradition, one art historian writes that “the compulsion to adapt themselves to ‘the example of the Soviet Union’ did not come to the architects as an order. It came upon them as a heavy pressure that was just as hard to resist as its consequences were hard to accept.”
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By the time construction was really under way, the city’s land was all state-owned, the city’s architects were all employed by the city bureau, and the national architectural periodicals—as in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany—were state-owned, producing regular articles and special supplements on Soviet architecture. In 1946–47, state printing presses even produced an anthology,
Soviet Architecture
, which lauded Soviet architectural achievements and attacked Russian “dissident” cultural figures, including the poet Anna Akhmatova. By 1949, no one had to be told that the party had the last word on all major building projects in Warsaw—though, at the same time, no one had to be forced to work on them.

In this sense Polish architects resembled German painters, none of whom had been forced at gunpoint to paint cartoonish works of propaganda either. On the contrary, just like Max Lingner in Germany, some of them did their best to convince themselves of Soviet architecture’s merits. In 1948, Sigalin traveled to Moscow to meet
Edmund Goldzamt, a Polish architect who had sought shelter in the Soviet Union during the Nazi occupation, had completed his architectural studies in Moscow, and seems to have been inclined to stay (he returned there in the 1970s). Goldzamt described the theory of Stalinist architectural socialist realism to Sigalin in a memorable, all-night conversation. “We have to have it,” Sigalin allegedly responded, and he persuaded Goldzamt to return to Warsaw as an adviser.
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Goldzamt would not have described himself, at that time or later, as a
Soviet lackey. Like Telakowska, he was an admirer of the British Arts and Crafts movement, with its emphasis on traditional patterns and designs. Later in his life, he wrote a book about
William Morris (with chapter titles such as “The Place of Morris in the Class Struggle”).
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But in his work, and in the work of his disciples, these theories played themselves out very differently than they had in the designs produced for Telakowska’s Bureau for Supervision of Production Aesthetics, let alone in Morris’s own workshops. In theory, Goldzamt believed that buildings were to be “socialist in content, but national in form.” In practice, he thought architects should impose “national” motifs, that is, kitschy decorations, derived from historical buildings and folk art, onto massive, Soviet-style structures.

Warsaw’s
Palace of Culture and Science, the most famous piece of High Stalinist architecture in Poland, was also the building that most clearly reflected Goldzamt’s theories. To this day, the Palace of Culture and Science looms over Warsaw, occupying an incongruous amount of space at the very heart of the city and depriving central Warsaw of any aesthetic continuity. The building was a gift from Stalin to the Polish people—a gift that seems to have been impossible to refuse. Poland’s economics minister,
Hilary Minc, apparently tried to suggest the erection of a housing estate instead, but Stalin wanted “a palace that would be visible from any point in the city,” according to
Jakub Berman, whose responsibilities included culture as well as the secret police.
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Many communists disliked the design (Berman conceded years later that “they didn’t do a very good job of it”) but Bierut admired it, or said he did. The Palace of Culture was not a cheap present: though the Soviet Union paid for the construction materials, the Poles had to pay for the Soviet workforce, on whose behalf a brand-new suburb was constructed, complete with a cinema and a swimming pool. The Polish government was also responsible for clearing the space in the center of the city, during the course of which many inhabitable houses were destroyed along with the traditional street plan.

The Palace of Culture was designed by Russian architects and executed in part by imported Russian workmen, using imported Russian tools and materials. But the Palace of Culture was supposed to be “socialist in content, national in form,” and so the Russian architects, led by
Lev Rudinev, solemnly toured the country. They visited the ancient cities of Kraków, Zamość, and Kazimierz, sketching baroque and renaissance motifs as they went along. They consulted with Sigalin and other Polish architects too.
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The result was, and remains, peculiar. From a distance, the Palace of Culture looks like an exact copy of the “wedding cake” skyscrapers that are scattered around Moscow, with a spire on top and four additional buildings grouped around the bottom, variously containing theaters, gyms, exhibition space, and a swimming pool. Up close, the “Polish” elements stand out. The tops of walls are lined with decorative elements copied from the Renaissance façades the Russians had seen in their Polish tour. Massive, oversize statues are grouped around the base, mostly showing “workers” in various grand poses, though their metaphorical significance is unclear. For decades, the palace was Warsaw’s only skyscraper—from 1955 to 1957 it was the tallest building in Europe—and it still seems out of place, though taller and more modern skyscrapers have now been constructed nearby. The building’s only merit is that it looks exactly like what it is: a Soviet imposition on the Polish capital, the wrong size and the wrong proportions, constructed without regard to the city’s history or culture.

A few other examples of Soviet architecture were also completed. Not far from the Palace of Culture, the architects of Warsaw managed to construct a socialist realist housing estate—the Marszałkowska Dzielnica Mieszkaniowa, or MDM—with monumental entryways, columns, grand stairways, and the same ambiguous sculptures of “workers” staring out into space. Soviet elements can also be seen in Muranów, a housing district built on the site of the old
Warsaw ghetto, and in a few other places too.

But the 1949 plan was unpopular, or at least not universally popular, as the communists themselves well knew. And so even as the Palace of Culture was under construction, the city bureau also began to rebuild Warsaw’s medieval Old Town and its historic main thoroughfare, Nowy Świat, in excruciating, painstaking detail. The party was somewhat embarrassed by this: Bierut explained that healthy, sanitary, contemporary apartments would be constructed behind the old-fashioned façades, and would be handed immediately to worthy members of the working class.
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But despite the addition of indoor plumbing, the Old Town eventually looked so familiar that some found it eerie. One former resident of the medieval city center described the effect years later: “The house I was born in was destroyed violently … but I can go into the bedroom I had as a boy, look out of the exact same window at the exact same house across the courtyard. There’s even a lamp bracket with a curious twist in it hanging in the same place.”
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This, at last, was popular, and for a while the Old Town was a powerful advertisement for the regime. Each new section was opened with great fanfare—the cutting of ribbons, the drinking of toasts—often on July 22, the anniversary of the creation of the Polish United Workers’ Party, or another communist holiday. Photographs of the reconstructed Old Town taken in the 1950s show people strolling and gazing “at the miracle of reconstruction.” What had been a dark, picturesque, decaying part of the city became well lit, open, and full of tourists.