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It can make sense to remove art from its context, but romanticizing Soviet underground stations should always involve some humility to the sacrifice involved.

It can make sense to remove art from its context, but romanticizing Soviet underground stations should always involve some humility to the sacrifice involved. Those stations cost phenomenal amounts at a time when much of the population was starving. The laborers that built them were pushed mercilessly, suffered terribly, and many died. To anyone who understands how those structures came to be they must be seen as monuments to human folly and misery.

rbanffy 6y ago
We should never forget the human cost of our civilization, from the people who toil endless hours to assemble our phones and computers, to the near slaves who extract the raw materials used in them, to the nomadic workers who pick the crops that end up in our supermarket, to the employee that restocks the shelves that has to work two shifts to feed their family and still requires food stamps to do that. Of course, some follies had higher human cost than others, but our comfortable lives are not entirely bloodless.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The difference is that, unless they have been scammed by traffickers, every one of these workers chose that fate over a worse fate. If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    There's no talk of "choice" when, as you admit it, the choice is between near-slavery or death.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      I don't admit that. However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.
    - wpurvis 6y ago
      Exactly. Work or die isn't a choice, its a threat.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- m0llusk 6y ago
  You are comparing smart phones and the development of modern industry and infrastructure with Stalin's purges and the Great Terror of 1936-1938. Results and body counts matter. Not entirely bloodless, indeed.
izacus 6y ago
This is equivalent to saying "We need to always mention that americans abused and raped black slaves when US constitution was written, so we should never talk about it without talking about slavery." It's trite, humiliating and shows your lack of knowlege beyond what is, essentially, western propaganda tropes. Most of those weren't built by starving people and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this. Please don't post these insulting messages unless your knowledge of history and sorrounding context of the achievements actually goes beyond single page textbook of a UK/US.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > This is equivalent to saying "We need to always mention that americans abused and raped black slaves when US constitution was written, so we should never talk about it without talking about slavery." So... you think you don't have too?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
    I think it’s fair to say that yes, we don’t have to address all the bad things an entity has historically done any time we want to talk about that entity in any capacity. If only as a purely practical concern – how many paragraphs does it take to enumerate the sins of the United States? Or any permanent member of the UN Security Council? Imagine every news story getting an additional six paragraphs of boilerplate for every country mentioned!
    - liability 6y ago
      How closely are the sins related to the subject matter? If an article were specifically about Antebellum architecture, some mention of slavery seems fairly reasonable. If an article were instead about snowboarding in America, mention of slavery is probably less expected.
  - 6y ago
Ericson2314 6y ago
It was my understanding that infra construction everywhere was pretty messy and bloody 100 years ago? It's probably no coincidence that the heyday of subway construction in NYC was over not long after the immigration ban of 1924 removed a source of plentiful cheap labor. (Of course, the Great depression not withstanding new deal subsidizing of IND lines, general impossibility of private transportation to stay profitable, and then WWII diversion of the production obscures this.)
andrepd 6y ago
That description applies perfectly, in our modern days, to the horrifying gulf cities like Dubai.
JohnBooty 6y ago
I don't disagree. I scanned the linked article and I noticed several instances where the author made explicit references to contrast between these grand architectural gestures and the plight faced by many Soviet workers and commoners. Did you feel the author failed to adequately address those realities? It's always a bit difficult to strike the right balance between "talking about the subject at hand" and "acknowledging human suffering that was directly or tangentially related", particularly when discussing historical matters, since just about any event in history will be at least tangentially related to various horrors suffered by assorted individuals and groups of people. The linked article appears to be written for an audience that has a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union and therefore gives only short mention to the (extremely important, more so than architecture!) human cost of such achievements. At any rate, I do suppose it's better to err on the side of over-acknowledging human suffering than to do the opposite.
tigerBL00D 6y ago
Do you mind sharing your references?
rubber_duck 6y ago
I find it funny that anyone would romanticises socialist architecture. I've grown up in a port town in former Yugoslavia (Rijeka) and if you walk throughout the city it's obvious the communist revolution was a regression in standards of living and cultural/technological sophistication. A lot of the buildings from the early 1900s look impressive even today (despite being terribly maintained) - when you see the level of detail, luxury and attention to craftsmanship it's obvious that those people are not of the same kind that lived there later. Communism started by "socialising" the property of previous owners and exiling/killing them - the new owners were not fit to govern them. This is also what happened post civil war - "privatisation" ended up with generals and people with political collections acquiring major companies and then running them to ground with incompetence, or zombifying them at the expense of public spending.
- vidarh 6y ago
  The same is true all over Europe. Workers rarely lived in those buildings. Look to London for example, and the beautiful town-houses in the centre were built for the rich. The run down brutalist tower blocks and vast expanses of terraced housing surrounding the centre were what was built as there was a need to house workers within reach of the city. You don't see the worker housing from before, because it's been torn down, or because the people in question didn't live in towns, but what was there was even worse. The buildings in the quarter where my great aunt grew up in in Oslo is in a museum, as the last example of the awful conditions the working class lived in back then. The replacement was a brutalist tower block that certainly looks atrocious compared to the lovely early 1900's city blocks that remain in Oslo. But those city blocks that remain are where the rich people lived.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    Not really true - there are plenty of buildings for the common folk from say 1920-1950, large apartment complexes where your middle class people would live. They aren't grandiose but the level of attention to detail, design and fitting into the landscape is unmatched by anything from the Communist era. I'll dig up some example photos when I get home. The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control. It really feels like it went from being a part of the civilized world (it was an important natural port for a long time in history for Austria) to a depressing city of old poor people slowly dying away - and there is so much potential there - the coastline is beautiful (industrial pollution can be cleaned up since the industry is also mostly dead), on a river bed and sunk in between hills (next to Opatija which was a summer place for monarchs). It has all hallmarks of a city and could be turned into an amazing place to live - but the people and the mentality left over from communism just make this impossible - there aren't enough quality people.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Such a strange claim. Lots of subways in the former USSR were built in 1960s-70s, some of wealthiest years in the Soviet Union. Subway construction workers were well respected and had very good salaries. As usual armchair historians of the USSR, talking about something they have no idea about.

rbanffy 6y ago

We should never forget the human cost of our civilization, from the people who toil endless hours to assemble our phones and computers, to the near slaves who extract the raw materials used in them, to the nomadic workers who pick the crops that end up in our supermarket, to the employee that restocks the shelves that has to work two shifts to feed their family and still requires food stamps to do that. Of course, some follies had higher human cost than others, but our comfortable lives are not entirely bloodless.

gridlockd 6y ago
The difference is that, unless they have been scammed by traffickers, every one of these workers chose that fate over a worse fate. If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
- andrepd 6y ago
  There's no talk of "choice" when, as you admit it, the choice is between near-slavery or death.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    I don't admit that. However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.
  - wpurvis 6y ago
    Exactly. Work or die isn't a choice, its a threat.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
m0llusk 6y ago
You are comparing smart phones and the development of modern industry and infrastructure with Stalin's purges and the Great Terror of 1936-1938. Results and body counts matter. Not entirely bloodless, indeed.

izacus 6y ago

This is equivalent to saying "We need to always mention that americans abused and raped black slaves when US constitution was written, so we should never talk about it without talking about slavery." It's trite, humiliating and shows your lack of knowlege beyond what is, essentially, western propaganda tropes. Most of those weren't built by starving people and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this. Please don't post these insulting messages unless your knowledge of history and sorrounding context of the achievements actually goes beyond single page textbook of a UK/US.

baybal2 6y ago
> This is equivalent to saying "We need to always mention that americans abused and raped black slaves when US constitution was written, so we should never talk about it without talking about slavery." So... you think you don't have too?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
  I think it’s fair to say that yes, we don’t have to address all the bad things an entity has historically done any time we want to talk about that entity in any capacity. If only as a purely practical concern – how many paragraphs does it take to enumerate the sins of the United States? Or any permanent member of the UN Security Council? Imagine every news story getting an additional six paragraphs of boilerplate for every country mentioned!
  - liability 6y ago
    How closely are the sins related to the subject matter? If an article were specifically about Antebellum architecture, some mention of slavery seems fairly reasonable. If an article were instead about snowboarding in America, mention of slavery is probably less expected.
- 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago

It was my understanding that infra construction everywhere was pretty messy and bloody 100 years ago? It's probably no coincidence that the heyday of subway construction in NYC was over not long after the immigration ban of 1924 removed a source of plentiful cheap labor. (Of course, the Great depression not withstanding new deal subsidizing of IND lines, general impossibility of private transportation to stay profitable, and then WWII diversion of the production obscures this.)

andrepd 6y ago

That description applies perfectly, in our modern days, to the horrifying gulf cities like Dubai.

JohnBooty 6y ago

I don't disagree. I scanned the linked article and I noticed several instances where the author made explicit references to contrast between these grand architectural gestures and the plight faced by many Soviet workers and commoners. Did you feel the author failed to adequately address those realities? It's always a bit difficult to strike the right balance between "talking about the subject at hand" and "acknowledging human suffering that was directly or tangentially related", particularly when discussing historical matters, since just about any event in history will be at least tangentially related to various horrors suffered by assorted individuals and groups of people. The linked article appears to be written for an audience that has a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union and therefore gives only short mention to the (extremely important, more so than architecture!) human cost of such achievements. At any rate, I do suppose it's better to err on the side of over-acknowledging human suffering than to do the opposite.

tigerBL00D 6y ago

Do you mind sharing your references?

rubber_duck 6y ago

I find it funny that anyone would romanticises socialist architecture. I've grown up in a port town in former Yugoslavia (Rijeka) and if you walk throughout the city it's obvious the communist revolution was a regression in standards of living and cultural/technological sophistication. A lot of the buildings from the early 1900s look impressive even today (despite being terribly maintained) - when you see the level of detail, luxury and attention to craftsmanship it's obvious that those people are not of the same kind that lived there later. Communism started by "socialising" the property of previous owners and exiling/killing them - the new owners were not fit to govern them. This is also what happened post civil war - "privatisation" ended up with generals and people with political collections acquiring major companies and then running them to ground with incompetence, or zombifying them at the expense of public spending.

vidarh 6y ago
The same is true all over Europe. Workers rarely lived in those buildings. Look to London for example, and the beautiful town-houses in the centre were built for the rich. The run down brutalist tower blocks and vast expanses of terraced housing surrounding the centre were what was built as there was a need to house workers within reach of the city. You don't see the worker housing from before, because it's been torn down, or because the people in question didn't live in towns, but what was there was even worse. The buildings in the quarter where my great aunt grew up in in Oslo is in a museum, as the last example of the awful conditions the working class lived in back then. The replacement was a brutalist tower block that certainly looks atrocious compared to the lovely early 1900's city blocks that remain in Oslo. But those city blocks that remain are where the rich people lived.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  Not really true - there are plenty of buildings for the common folk from say 1920-1950, large apartment complexes where your middle class people would live. They aren't grandiose but the level of attention to detail, design and fitting into the landscape is unmatched by anything from the Communist era. I'll dig up some example photos when I get home. The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control. It really feels like it went from being a part of the civilized world (it was an important natural port for a long time in history for Austria) to a depressing city of old poor people slowly dying away - and there is so much potential there - the coastline is beautiful (industrial pollution can be cleaned up since the industry is also mostly dead), on a river bed and sunk in between hills (next to Opatija which was a summer place for monarchs). It has all hallmarks of a city and could be turned into an amazing place to live - but the people and the mentality left over from communism just make this impossible - there aren't enough quality people.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

Such a strange claim. Lots of subways in the former USSR were built in 1960s-70s, some of wealthiest years in the Soviet Union. Subway construction workers were well respected and had very good salaries. As usual armchair historians of the USSR, talking about something they have no idea about.