The relationship between Brutalism and the Post-Soviet human

My first memory of a building (that is not my home) is a hall in a hospital.

It distinctively smells of dust and of something dull and deep, earthy. Which is coffee, but at whatever tender age I was at the time, I didn’t know that. There is plenty of natural light to illuminate the dust particles in the air, rising from the rough carpet, sticking to sleek but flimsy window frames. Maybe there was a couch, just as old and full of dust as the rest of the hallway. Maybe there’s a potted plant. The potted plants in such places are always the best thing about them. A pathetic attempt to give life to a place that might as well be a panoramic, produced by a skillful but unimaginative student, that’s how strange and off-putting they feel.

Growing up in Lithuania, having half of my family back in Russia, I got used to the bland, gray, characterless architecture of public buildings older than thirty years. These buildings, all the same, just with different stains on their outside concrete, different shades of rough carpets, different potted plants. They seem to yearn to be defined by their lack of character. After all, they reportedly originated from architects’ need to counter the modern, whimsical projects of the 1940s. For them, function and low price were essential.

With characteristics like these, it’s unsurprising that it became a cultural staple of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. Big, looming, but at the same time practical, facades speak right down to you saying “See how innovative, how well-constructed we are, how the great communist spirit allowed us to be both grandiose and universally accessible”. And, more importantly, concrete is cheap. Communism promised to fulfill all necessities, so the Soviet government had to fulfill its promise in the cheapest way possible. These buildings are omnipresent throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, unnoticeable to the local citizen, but to a traveler who doesn’t live amongst these concrete slabs, it appears almost dystopian.

The Soviet Union dissolved and its members, eagerly awaiting that historical moment, immediately got to work removing its parasitic marks which grew into the fabric of their nations. Being a comrade meant erasing anything too national in a state, dissolving into the ‘bigger picture’ so as to not anger the powers that be. It is only natural Russian street names, memorials to Lenin, any indication of ever being suppressed were weeded out like pests. But you can’t just demolish hospitals, municipal buildings, schools simply because they remind you of systemic injustices that happened within them. So the Brutalist buildings remained. They were quickly outnumbered, like stumps in a young forest, by modern buildings - cheery glass facades, colorful faux-Classicist, post-modern constructions. They became inhabited haunted houses in the public consciousness, too strange to fit into their streets, too guiltless to remove. All the different architecture around them seems to very intentionally send one message: “We know. We don’t like them either. Just don’t think about it too much”.

So now, with the presence of the Union gone, everyone is welcome to outwardly gawk at these locations. The majority of HBO’s Chernobyl was shot in Lithuania, although it is meant to take place in Ukraine and Russia. This fact seems to be a small national pride, buildings which appear in it being renovated with the money the show provided. Although they were specifically chosen for their distinct dishevelment. You are meant to look at the locations in Chernobyl, the muted color scheme of the show, how it portrays government and apartment buildings, and associate them with the corruption and deficit of the 1980s Soviet Union.

So why do I feel sad seeing these buildings demolished, renovated, forgotten? Maybe it’s the specificity of when these buildings appeared in my life. I didn’t see them erected, I didn’t watch corruption, poverty, misery take place in them. To me, they take the quality any old building would to a person - a sudden stirring sense of being in a place where time is stuck in a moment long past. And life marches on inside those living haunted houses, perhaps a kinder life than that of the Soviet era. In these design-wise frankly depressing structures I have watched riveting theater plays, received life-altering news from doctors, met friends. In a sense, despite having a perfectly average, lively home, I lived in these gray and unwelcoming places.

All houses are haunted in a way. And Brutalist ones, with their lack of anything that doesn’t serve a functional purpose, almost invite ghosts in. There is an inherent friction between Brutalism’s lack of aesthetic narrative and the human need to assign emotions and stories to everything. Everything that happened in and around these buildings is imprinted in all the vivid colors they themselves lack. And collective memory is much stronger than a personal one. Despite feeling somewhat insulted each time a Brutalist structure is presented as inherently menacing, unwelcoming, I have to bite my tongue. Haunted houses have that effect on people. Before the cliche terror, there is unease and confusion.

We (Eastern European and Russian people, living amongst these houses) are not their inhabitants. We’re their ghosts. And we will continue to haunt them, with both our collective and personal grievances. But again, so do we haunt every house we step in. We are in a symbiotic relationship with every place we visit, we need them to have a story and they need us to assign it. 

I’m sad to see Brutalism go, but comforted its ghost will remain. In whatever form that may be.