Chapter 15
IDEAL CITIES
O my steel mill! Mother of the countless masses
Who work together for your glory
You strengthen my heart
I grew up on your soil …
—From “To My Steel Mill,” Urszula Ciszek-Frankiewicz1
I looked for the city. I came through the village and ended up in a big puddle … With some compassion the workers looked across to a man carrying a briefcase—back then many of these came to give directives—whose small car had got stuck in the mud. The circumstances were chaotic. People arrived in droves and didn’t know each other.
—Jószef Bondor, a party functionary, remembering his arrival in Sztálinváros2
LIKE SO MANY photographs of its era, the carefully posed picture was intended to educate. On the left, a young woman with her hair tied back in a peasant scarf stands with her hands behind her back, listening attentively. She wears a gingham shirt and overalls. On the right, another woman, her foot placed firmly on a step, points into the middle distance. She wears a more formal skirt and blouse, carries a pencil and paper, and is giving instructions. Both women are members of an all-female construction brigade, and they are hard at work on the new steel mill in the new city of Sztálinváros—Stalintown. The woman on the right with the pencil is Zsófia Tevan, an engineer and architect. The woman on the left in the gingham blouse is Júlia Kollár, a bricklayer.
Kollár had arrived in Sztálinváros in 1951. The daughter of peasant farmers, she finished school at the age of thirteen just after the war and then went immediately to work—“at that time we accepted any job that was offered to us”—eventually making her way to a construction site in the town of Mohács, near the Yugoslav border in southern Hungary, where work had begun on a major steel mill. In the summer of 1949, special courses were organized in Mohács for unskilled workers like Kollár. She learned how to mix mortar and how to lay bricks. She also joined the communist youth movement, by then known as the League of Working Youth (Dolgozó Ifjúság Szövetsége, or DISZ). But after only a few months, work at Mohács came to an abrupt halt. The authorities announced that the building site would be moved to the village of Dunapentele, situated along the Danube in central Hungary. All of the Mohács workers and supervisors were invited to move as well.
Kollár accepted, received five more months of training at the Construction Ministry in Budapest, and arrived at the new construction site in the spring of 1951. At first, she was shocked by the conditions. In Mohács, she had lived in a house with her mother and her siblings, but in Dunapentele the young workers slept in tents and makeshift dormitories: “There were five or six people in a single room, people were sleeping in bunk beds.” She almost gave up and went home, but was convinced to stay by Tevan, her work supervisor.
Unusually, Tevan had her own apartment: “There was a hostel for engineers but since everybody was a man, I got a separate room in a half-ready building. The walls were not plastered, the room was so damp that I had to sleep with my clothes on and by the morning all my clothes had become wet.” But the apartment did have indoor plumbing and a small kitchen, and Tevan lived alone. Though she didn’t tell Kollár at the time, her fiancé was then in prison, having been swept up with dozens of others in the wake of the Rajk trial. She invited Kollár to stay with her, and the two women lived together until Kollár married a year later.
For Kollár, the period that followed seemed, in retrospect, a very happy one. When I met her in 2009 she remembered her first years on the steel mill construction site with immense nostalgia. Early on, she had joined the first all-women’s construction brigade at Sztálinváros, along with Tevan, at the time an enormous honor. Launched on March 8—International Women’s Day, according to the Soviet calendar—with great pomp and circumstance, the brigade had mixed success. Although placing tiles on walls and floors was a perfectly acceptable job for women, Tevan remembered that “pouring concrete was not, especially as we did not have the right equipment … it was physically very difficult, even though the women were enthusiastic.” Because the brigade’s progress was carefully watched by the media it couldn’t be allowed to fail: when they had trouble meeting deadlines, one of the men’s brigades would surreptitiously help the women bricklayers finish their tasks quickly.
Though her brigade worked from early in the morning until late in the evening, Kollár was also very active in her League of Working Youth section. In her own words, she “did voluntary work, carried out social campaigns, bought peace bonds.” Kollár served as a mentor to new girls on the site, went to dances, and helped put on plays and concerts: “It was a community, and people need community. We are social creatures, we need others.” When she heard that the League of Working Youth would be sending a delegation to the international youth festival in Berlin, she went to see Elek Horváth, head of the youth cadres at the factory, who was running the selection committee. They ran into each other on a staircase—she found him strikingly handsome—and she asked to be chosen.
But he did not select her. Later, Horváth told her he didn’t want her to go to Berlin because “she might have met someone there.” He had fallen instantly in love, and they were married a few months later. The civil ceremony, held at the brand-new registry office, was simple—“no special dresses”—and Tevan was a witness. The bride almost arrived late, having spent the morning cleaning the one-room apartment they had received from the city the day before. No photographs were taken, since there weren’t any photographers. Afterward, they went out to a restaurant. On the following Monday they all returned to work.3
At the time of its construction, the vast steel mill that shaped the early lives and careers of Kollár, Tevan, and Horváth was the largest and most ambitious industrial investment in Hungary. Everything about the project was highly politicized, and everything about it was shaped by Soviet advice and Soviet concerns from the very start. The design was selected at a meeting between Hungarian officials and their Soviet counterparts in Moscow, in 1949. The original site was also selected jointly—Mohács had been chosen for its proximity to transportation and the quality of its soil—but after the Soviet spat with Yugoslavia it was deemed too close to the border. As Mátyás Rákosi told the Hungarian Politburo in December 1949, the new site in Dunapentele, along the Danube, was less advantageous in some ways, and the sandy soil would eventually complicate construction. But it was nearer to Budapest and farther from Tito.
Once the site had been chosen, the project moved with Soviet-style haste. Construction began even before planning had finished. In the early months there was no time to build housing, so workers like Kollár lived in tents and primitive barracks, and there was no time to plaster the walls of new apartments. Workers from nearby farms pitched in as “Sunday help” so that construction could continue through the weekends. When it got dark, night shifts worked under powerful lights. In the summer, youth groups came from all over the country to help too.4
Sztálinváros was unique in Hungary, but not in the Soviet bloc. It was one of several “socialist cities,” all founded around vast new steel mills, that collectively represent the Eastern European communists’ most comprehensive attempt to jump-start the creation of a truly totalitarian civilization. The steel mills were intended to accelerate industrialization and thus the production of armaments. The huge construction sites were meant to draw the peasantry into factories and thus enlarge the working class. The new factory complexes, built from scratch, were intended to prove, definitively, that when unhindered by preexisting economic relationships, central planning could produce more rapid economic growth than capitalism.
The architecture and design of the new cities were also meant to facilitate the development of a new kind of society, one that would facilitate the spread of Homo sovieticus. In these brand-new communities, traditional organizations and institutions would have no sway, old habits would not hinder progress, and communist organizations would exert enormous influence over young people bec
ause there weren’t any others. The socialist city, as one German historian writes, was to be a place “free of historical burdens, where a new human being was to come into existence, the city and the factory were to be a laboratory of a future society, culture, and way of life.”5
The new factories and the new cities beside them were shaped by communist imperatives from the beginning. Sztálinváros was moved away from the Yugoslav border for security reasons, but the new Polish steel town of Nowa Huta was deliberately placed beside the city of Kraków, with its longstanding aristocratic, historical, and intellectual traditions, for ideological reasons. “They wanted to change the character of Kraków,” explained Stanisław Juchnowicz, one of Nowa Huta’s original architects. “They wanted to create a working class who would change the city.”6
Even at the time, this was controversial: dozens of Kraków institutions protested against the decision to place an enormous steel mill directly beside an ancient city with a medieval university, but to no avail. According to an account written at the time, the Soviet engineers who helped select the site “stated their surprise at discovering that the proposed construction of a steel mill next to Kraków created suspicion and opposition among representatives of the society, not enthusiasm.” They suspected city authorities might simply be shirkers who “feared the hard work” that the project would entail. The protests were ignored and the decision went ahead.7 By the 1970s, heavy air pollution had indeed turned all of the medieval buildings of Kraków black. Juchnowicz, later a founder of the city’s ecological society, explained that “at the time, our consciousness of this problem was pretty low.”8
The placement of East Germany’s first major steel town, Eisenhüttenstadt—rechristened Stalinstadt in 1953—was similarly political. A new steel combine was a particular imperative in East Germany because the prewar German coal and steel industries were located almost entirely in the western half of the country. A number of sites were considered, including one on the Baltic, the better to import iron ore from Sweden. This plan was quashed by Walter Ulbricht, probably following a conversation with Stalin, who didn’t want “his” Germany to become too dependent on the West. Finally, at a meeting with the industrial experts charged with planning the site, Ulbricht settled the question of the new mill’s location with a flourish. He took out a compass and put it on a map of Germany that was spread out on a table. “Look here,” he declared, and drew a semicircle from the U.S. bases in Bavaria. Then he spread the compass and pointed to one suggested site: “That’s about seven minutes’ air-raid warning.” Then he extended the compass to the town of Fürstenberg, on the eastern border of the GDR, and said, “That’s about fifteen minutes’ air-raid warning.” One of those present pointed out that this kind of reasoning could not be made public. “Of course not,” Ulbricht replied; the new steelworks were being placed in the east in order to take advantage of iron ore coming from central Ukraine and coal from Poland. “And so it will be a work of friendship, and that’s how we are going to argue about it.”9
Fürstenberg had other advantages, including high numbers of refugees who could be put to work on the site. There was no large town in the vicinity, and that was a good thing too.10 Ulbricht, like his Polish and Hungarian colleagues, was personally committed to the idea of a city “uncontaminated by old workplace values.”11 Fürstenberg had no industry and thus no workplace values of any kind.
Like the combine at Sztálinváros, the mills in Nowa Huta and Stalinstadt were of Soviet design, and Russian engineers were involved in their construction from the very beginning. In both Hungary and Poland, all of the planning and instructional materials—provided by Giprometz, a Soviet state company—had to be translated from Russian, which caused multiple misunderstandings. (Even the laudatory official accounts of Nowa Huta’s construction allude to the “language difficulties” that resulted.)12 The Russians also sent equipment, much of which had to be “modified” for Polish conditions or even remodeled entirely.13 In Germany, meanwhile, the decision to use Soviet technology was laden with multiple ironies. The plans brought to Stalinstadt were the same as those developed by American advisers for the steel combine at Magnitogorsk in the Urals in the 1930s. Not only were they therefore “capitalist” in origin but they were also less sophisticated than those subsequently developed in Germany and already in use in the western half of the country.14
The urban architecture of the new cities was no less political. Socialist realist architects treated the designs as an important experiment. Honored foreign visitors were brought to witness their progress. The workers and engineers of Stalinstadt paid ceremonial visits to Nowa Huta and Sztálinváros, and vice versa. In due course, artists and writers would be invited to record the new lives being lived in the new cities. Many elements of High Stalinist culture came together in the planning of these three cities: the cult of heavy industry, the cult of the shock worker, the youth movements, and socialist realist aesthetics.
The stakes were high: by the early 1950s, the Eastern European communists were desperate to prove that their failing economic and political theories could work. Many believed that one final, superhuman effort to raise workers’ living standards and create “new men” might finally win the communists the legitimacy they needed.
But what did a “socialist” city look like? Once again, nobody knew. In 1950, a small group of East German architects went to Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, and Stalingrad to find out. They rode the Moscow metro, attended the May Day celebrations in Red Square, and even caught a glimpse of Stalin, as they reported later on: “We were standing on the side of the [Lenin] mausoleum where the stairs go up to the stand, and he walked past us on the stairs … the storm of enthusiasm grew immensely. We were very sorry not to be inside the demonstration, just being observers … Such a colorful picture is indescribable. The flags, the posters and pictures, the variety of colors …”15
Duly impressed by the spectacle, they listened attentively in the meetings that followed. They learned that the Soviet Union had built more than 400 new cities and that in each one “the planning bureau solves all questions on where to place things and how to organize them.” They showed their Soviet colleagues their plans for the reconstruction of central Berlin, which the Soviet colleagues—ironically, given their scorn for German history—found unacceptably ahistorical: “The only time they criticized us directly was with the reproach that the great traditions of German city planning were not cherished in Germany.” New cities, they were told, had to take up regional traditions, from Berlin classicism to North German gothic. That would make them more “democratic.”
In addition, they learned that their Soviet colleagues favored urban over rural (“the city demonstrates the political will and the national consciousness of the nation”), heavy industry over agriculture and services (“cities are built largely by industry and for industry”), and multistory apartment blocks over leafy suburbs (“it is impossible to change a city into a garden”). In fact, they had no interest in suburbs of any kind. The character of a city, the Soviet architects declared, “is that people live an urban life. And on the edges of the city or outside the city, they live a rural life.”
The group returned to Berlin filled with evangelical zeal. They organized meetings and conferences, held seminars and training sessions designed to pass on what they had learned. Walter Pistonek, one of the German architects, gave seventeen public lectures between May and November 1950, and published more than a dozen articles. Eventually, the group published “Sixteen Principles” of socialist planning, which became part of East German law and remained so until 1989. Ulbricht became so enthusiastic about the new plans that he approved the construction of a Stalinist “wedding cake” skyscraper in Dresden, much like the Warsaw Palace of Culture. Fortunately, it was never built.
Yet despite the general enthusiasm for socialist realist architecture, the concept was no clearer in practice to German town planners than it had been to Polish town planners. In Stalinstadt, many of the
architects at first built what they knew how to build: simple, streamlined structures in the Bauhaus tradition (which had itself been a left-wing movement dedicated to the construction of “homes for the workers”). But when Ulbricht visited the first completed apartments in January 1952, he declared that they were too small and too plain, like “undecorated boxes.” New plans were made and discarded more than once.16
Finally, the East German leadership appointed a new chief architect. Karl Leucht increased the size of the city planning office from 40 to 650 employees, accelerated the speed of the project, and declared that in the future the city’s buildings were to be “an expression of the growing wealth of socialist society” and a reflection of the high status of the working class. A new and more “monumental” phase of construction began. Apartment blocks were linked by high archways. Doorways were flanked by columns. Elements intended to evoke the classical tradition in German art (this was deemed the most “progressive” period of German culture) were mounted on façades, though sometimes in an almost haphazard manner. The new city was designed around the factory: though separated from the city by a greenbelt, the factory gates could be seen in the distance from the main streets, much as Berliners can see the Brandenburg Gate from the far end of Unter den Linden. Until 1981, no churches were built in the city at all. Instead, Leucht designed a town hall with a spire.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 Page 50