Comparing and contrasting the post-1945 re-building of Warsaw and Minsk city centres
Comparing and contrasting the post-1945 re-building of Warsaw and Minsk city centres

Summary/Abstract: The so-called “Stalinist episode” (1948/9–1955/6 in Warsaw; 1945 dragged out to the late-1950s in Soviet-held Minsk) was of crucial significance to both cities, being marked by intensive construction work primarily focused on the respective city centres. In Warsaw, this was a brief and highly-charged seven or so years intricately intertwined with setting up the Polish People’s Republic. The foundations were thus laid for a so-called socialist capital city, characterised by ‘communalisation’ of property, zealous architects enjoying Party favour and ripping down the burnt-out ruins of a great many readily restorable buildings; above all tenement houses from the anathematised «bougeois-capitalist» era of c.1850–1914. Re-building in the capital of the BSSR still enjoys wide recognition for transforming it into a million+ city. The obliterated main street became the showpiece Stalin (now Independence) Avenue; Lenin, Engels, Karl Marks, other central streets undergoing partial redevelopment. While key historic monuments were ripped down, the still prominent remnant architecture from c.1850–1914 was typically restored, heightened or readapted to suit the Stalinist aesthetic. ‘Historic Minsk’ began to be reinvented after 1991. Summary reference is additionally made to the respective pre-1939 and pre-941 urban-architectural profiles of Warsaw and Minsk, their wartime destruction and continued urban re development beyond the key Stalinist ‘episode’ that had defined vital aspects of the post-1945 built urban environment.

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