Dariusz Aleksandrowicz Aleksandrowicz - Europa-Universität ...

D. Aleksandrowicz: The Socialist City and its Transformation 3
spatial order represented by the city as well as from the specific visual experience
permanently offered in it.
In the history of Communism and its ideology, however, the historicist metaphysics
which originally formed the core of the respective ideas was gradually dwarfed by
interpretations suggested by a more pragmatic assessment of problems in the light of
realpolitik. 4 Although the crucial notions such as “Communism,” which referred to
the desired model of society, still could not be understood without taking into account
the revolutionary eschatology they were originally rooted in, they at the same
time acquired a more practical and concrete meaning. It was most of all Stalinism
that succeeded in pushing the idea and the practice of Communism away from the
purely abstract notions once developed in Marxism. The chief invention of Stalinism
was in this respect to establish “industrialization” as a secular equivalent of the
metaphysical idea of “emergence of Communism.”
Industrialization and creation and/or further development of the working class were
therefore the major “practical” objectives to which the socialist cities owed its existence.
Since we can speak about both “industrialization” and “working class” also
with regard to the Western society, it is important to note the specific “socialist”
meaning of these terms due to the specific features of the reality to which they refer.
“Industrialization” here chiefly means the construction of production plants (especially
in the domain of heavy industry). The function of these plants was to employ
people and to produce things according to directives resulting from the politicallydefined
production plan. Apart from some physical or even technological similarity,
the socialist “production plant” had little in common with the “enterprise” in the
economic sense of the word. Correspondingly, the socialist working class, unlike the
class of employees in a Western society, owed its very existence not to the economic
process, and its position was not determined by what was taking place on the market.
More significant was its relation to the socialist state. It was exactly the socialist
state and not the market that created and secured the place of work, determined the
conditions of work and of life, and defined the system of duties and privileges for the
members of the working class. 5
II. Specific features of a socialist city
Socialist cities or settlements of the Stalinist period and those of the later decades
differ architectonically from each other. The first of them were usually built in a
socialist “neo-classical” style with socialist “baroque” elements added to it,
whereas the simplistic architecture of the latter was determined by technology of the
pre-cast panels. What they have in common is, however, an egalitarian, anti-
4 For more cf. Aleksandrowicz (1989).
5 For more cf. Aleksandrowicz (1993a; 1998a)