New Books In Eastern European Studies

When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The Russians called them “houses” (doma), but they weren’t houses as I understood them at all. They were huge, multi-story, cookie-cutter apartment blocks, one standing right next to the other for miles. “Why?” I asked myself. Kimberly Zarecor‘s wonderfulManufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (Pittsburgh UP, 2011) goes a long way in providing an answer, and it’s a surprising one. As she shows, socialism and architectural modernism were tightly linked even before the Second World War. This was true in the Soviet Union, of course, but it was also true throughout much of Europe–especially in Czechoslovakia. The avante guard of Czech architects were enthralled with modernism, just as they were (with some exceptions) enthralled with the promise of communism. They believed modernism provided a template for a truly socialist architecture, par