Elena Goukassian
A few months ago, news broke
in Russia that the government planned to raze almost 8,000 apartment
buildings in Moscow and relocate their residents into newer structures.
Although the plan sounds like both a logistical and a social disaster,
not to mention a mass infringement on the individual rights of the
city’s residents, I must admit that my first reaction was (almost
embarrassingly) to take the side of the authorities.
The apartment
buildings in question are those hideous concrete structures that sprang
up like mushrooms in the postwar period across the whole of communist
Eastern Europe. I thought people might be happy to see these eyesores —
and the memories of the Khrushchev era and the dystopian realities of
communism that went with them — finally meet their demise. I grew up in a
family from Sofia, Bulgaria and Yerevan, Armenia; I’ve heard my fair
share of complaints about these behemoths. Having lived my early
childhood and several extended stays in Sofia inside a one-room
apartment in one of these buildings, I’ve also experienced them
first-hand.
These
panel buildings first appeared in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev in
the late 1950s as a quick and cheap way to relocate families in
increasingly overcrowded communal apartments, especially in the big
cities. The forced industrialization of the USSR was already well
underway, and urban populations exploded as the government relocated
people to work in its newly opened factories. Because the communist
ideal was tied to metropolitan living, apartment blocks rose even in the
more sparsely populated areas, consolidating previously scattered
residents into a single building.
In many ways, these
buildings were a Cold War response to the American (read: capitalist)
suburbs cropping up at the same time. While suburbs in the US focused on
the success of the individual through ownership of a single-family
detached house, the Eastern Bloc’s ideal living situation was clearly
the opposite — as many public spaces as possible, and the smaller the
private space, the better. And if everyone lives in the exact same
(always tiny) apartment, that clearly means that the social classes are
no longer relevant, right?
Just as the panel buildings themselves
were a cheap bastardization of the utopian ideals of Brutalist
architecture (à la Le Corbusier), the communities formed around these
buildings were a haphazard and diluted version of the ideals of
communism itself. By the time the panel buildings started cropping up on
the outskirts of Sofia, the new neighborhoods that were supposed to
include all their residents’ basic needs — a grocery store, restaurants,
daycare, schools — were completely absent; many remained unbuilt for
years.
When I was born, my parents took me home to an apartment on
the fourth floor of a then brand-new panel building in the Darvenitsa
neighborhood of Sofia. (Darvenitsa is a fabricated residential
neighborhood consisting of a few dozen of these buildings, built from
the 1960s through the ‘80s over a previously existing village.) After
years of bureaucracy, the local officials had finally relocated my
parents to their own one-room apartment in the 1980s. Once everyone
moved into the new building, it was still a couple of years before the
authorities connected a heating system and phone lines. Residents
sloshed through the mud to get home, as the streets had yet to be paved.
Apart
from problems familiar to anyone who has lived in a poor country (or
for that matter a poor area in a rich country) — tiny living areas,
missing doors, broken elevators, random periods without heat or running
water, etc. — I recall situations over the years that seemed to be
particular to these artificial neighborhoods of concrete block
buildings.
One
of the biggest problems was navigation and simply trying to tell the
buildings apart. Although they’re all technically numbered, there is no
logic to it. Building #4 could be next door to #21, with #3 a ten-minute
walk to the opposite side of the neighborhood. And because there were
often alleys instead of streets, and these were mostly unnamed, or at
least unmarked, there was no way to know where you were going unless you
were in your own neighborhood. And even then, you’re often only aware
of the building numbers that are either right next door or where your
friends live. (Now, Google Maps has largely mapped everything, which is a
godsend.)
Several years ago, while I was walking from my family’s
Sofia apartment, which my parents were able to buy after the collapse
of communism, to the metro stop, I saw a couple of neighborhood kids
playing basketball on an overgrown court; all of a sudden, the hoop
teetered and fell right on one of the kids. When I called the ambulance,
I was unable to tell the dispatcher the number of the apartment block
nearest to the accident, even through I took the same route to the metro
every morning that summer.
The amount of public space in between
the buildings is also striking. Ideally, there would be green lawns for
kids to play soccer and benches for their grandparents to gossip, but
most of the expansive space between apartment buildings was either used
for parking or overgrown with weeds. (In the ’90s, it was where packs of
homeless dogs attacked old people carrying groceries.)
Although
the panel buildings and their neighborhoods still have some problems,
they now boast all the amenities promised so many years ago — schools,
restaurants and beer gardens, grocery stores, easy access to public
transportation, doctors’ offices. Trees have grown around the concrete
buildings, creating shade and breaking up the large open spaces in
between. No one ever expected these buildings to last this long (they
appear to be more resilient than some of the newer structures cropping
up around the city), and at this point, they’ve become so ingrained in
the post-communist landscape that it would be hard to convince people to
let them go.
The origin stories of the panel buildings in
Darvenitsa, and all over the former Eastern Bloc, have slowly passed
into the realm of history. Residents are proud of living in the same
buildings that were once almost universally despised. My family finally
sold our apartment last year, to a young woman who remodeled the whole
interior and is still very excited to live there. In an ironic twist, it
seems to have taken a healthy dose of capitalist individualism to
rehabilitate a failed communist utopia.
"Hyperallergic" (https://hyperallergic.com/416835/the-intimate-past-and-uncertain-future-of-soviet-concrete-architecture/), December 12, 2017
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