The Palace’s origin story is part of the problem. It was framed as a direct gift from Stalin (although he died two years before construction was completed in 1955), designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, and largely built with Soviet machinery and labourers. It clearly resembles the “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers in Moscow — the largest of which, Moscow State University, was also a Rudnev design. Despite the incorporation of Polish national elements into the structure — the result of an architectural tour of the country that Rudnev undertook with Warsaw chief architect Józef Sigalin — the Palace is an indelible reminder of a post-war settlement that some Poles consider shameful. In Murawski’s words, “people were more negatively disposed towards it in the communist era because it was a direct expression not only of communism, but more so of Russian domination.” [...]
To simply equate the towering Palace with the oppressions of state socialism, however, is far too reductive. It was in no way universally disliked under communism, for one. This Stalinist edifice was the place where regular Poles were most likely to encounter Western culture: The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis played there; the bookshop of the Polish Academy of Sciences was the best place to buy foreign journals. As Murawski puts it, the Palace “always had this weird, double function.” His research suggests that, counter to popular opinion, it is precisely those Warsaw residents who have strong recollections of communism who are more likely to appreciate the Palace than “young people who have the bizarre, jaded idea that communism was all about Stalinist jackboots.” [...]
This is what Murawski hails as the “still-socialist” nature of the Palace, arguably its defining characteristic. He points out that the idea of “post-socialist” Eastern Europe ignores the fact that “a lot of powerful residues of the socialist period which completely transformed those countries continue to exist. The Palace is a socialist ghost or zombie which continues to haunt the reality of the capitalist city. Warsaw is a wild capitalist place: everything’s being privatised, there are huge billboards everywhere, children are being turfed out of their kindergartens so that aristocrats can move back into their stately homes. The Palace is an island exuding a kind of still-socialist publicness over the debris of the discombobulated city.” [...]
The Palace’s future as a beacon of public-mindedness in a hostile urban and political environment is far from guaranteed, though it has proven remarkably resilient thus far. Whatever the results of this autumn’s parliamentary elections — where left parties are predicted to gain up to 15 per cent of the vote — it will continue to serve as a lightning rod for Poles’ conflicting emotions about communism and capitalism alike. A more nuanced understanding of the nation’s past is sorely needed; the Palace proves that it is also more honest.
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