What Stalin Built

Hatherley didn’t go round Moscow with Sytin in his backpack, and indeed it’s hard to imagine any point of connection between his sensibility and that of the Russian intelligentsia. Žižek is a hovering presence, and there is a dash of Boris Groys as well. Hatherley would like to think the communist regimes did something right in creating living space for their people and hopes to find some elements of ‘real socialism’ in their built environments. But there’s always something like a wry grin on his face when he hints at these hopes. ‘Like many Soviet ideas,’ he writes in frustration at one point, ‘it is so obviously right and so obviously botched.’ Architecturally, his core allegiance is to modernism (the brutalist and utopian kinds, not the defanged ‘Ikea modernism’, which he disdains), but he has developed a certain affection for Stalinist monumentalism.