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Artur Klinov

Sun City

Europeans coming to Minsk for the first time are usually startled by a strange, but genuinely moving sense of enchantment that they sense in the city. On the one hand, visitors are struck by a phenomenon relatively rare within Europe: that of a town built in Empire style, which somehow does not look cold or threatening. Far from overwhelming the individual with the scale of its architecture, any hardness about Minsk’s appearance is mitigated to an extraordinary extent by a certain air of provincial sentimentality. On the other, Minsk also contains such an abundance of zones of irrationality or absurdity within its urban space, that the newcomer is very likely soon to find himself feeling like the hero of a novel by Kafka, Elias Canetti or Daniel Kharms.

Minsk’s history stretches back almost a thousand years to an act of bloody carnage on the banks of the River Nemiga. In 1067 the Kievan, Chernigovian and Pereslavl princes Iziaslav, Sviatoslav and Vsevolod, roused an armed force and marched against the prince of Polotsk, Vseslav. They took Minsk, slaughtering the men and giving the women and children to the warriors as a reward (or more accurately as prisoners) after the victory. It might have been possible to consign this sorrowful episode to the darker recesses of history, were it not for the fact that the following thousand years of the Minsk’s history have largely been variations on the theme of this first chronicled event: bloodshed and destruction. But the uniqueness of Minsk is not to be found in the painful history that the town has suffered. For Minsk’s position on the crossroads of the two great paths from Europe to Eurasia, both from West to East, and also ‘from the Vikings to the Greeks’, from North to South, has proved both extremely dangerous, and extremely fertile. It is this location that has been the cause not just of the town’s tragic history but also the guarantee of its perpetual resurrection. For the characteristic that defines Minsk above all others is its astonishing capacity for regeneration, or to put it more accurately for reincarnation. For each time the town has risen from the ashes it has done so not as a continuation of its previous state, but as a different town with a new aesthetic, a new style of life, a new mythology and sometimes even a new national and religious makeup of its population. In different epochs of its history Minsk has at one time or another been predominantly orthodox, catholic, uniate church, Jewish, again orthodox, soviet, Sarmation, baroque and a centre of provincial administration.

However, the most interesting and unusual reincarnation from an aesthetic point of view is undoubtedly Minsk’s last reincarnation as a city of Empire. This was precipitated by the systematic destruction of the city by the Soviet air force during the Second World War. As is well known, German forces occupied Minsk on June 28^th 1941, on the sixth day of the war with the Soviet Union. At this point, the damage to Minsk had been minimal. However, from 1941 to 1944 the Soviet air force carried out a systematic bombing campaign against the city, in line with Stalin’s policy that all territory occupied by the Germans constituted enemy territory. Thus, everything situated on that territory was a fair target for destruction.

  After the war, the decision was taken not to rebuild what had been destroyed, but to create a radically different town in its place. In fact not just a different town, but the perfect town according to the ideals of a communist-style utopia. It was an attempt at building a ‘Sun City’, an attempt at creating absolute spatial harmony for the ideal citizen of the coming communist age. Any utopia is an attempt to construct happiness. And every project of happiness has its own ideal town. It is the ideal town of a utopia that plays the major role in forming an aesthetic of happiness: but the precise nature of this aesthetic varies according to the configurations and canons that define happiness for the utopia’s creators. The aesthetic of happiness as conceived of by a workers’ and peasants’ state was in one way or another linked to everything that the ‘oppressed classes’ had always been deprived from. The harmonious individual of the future, in their view, should of course live not in just any old ramshackle block or building of bog-standard construction, but in a fine palace, surrounded by wonderful parks with fountains and magnificent sculptures, creating a fitting urban representation of the internal harmony of the harmonious individual. These palaces should be linked by broad straight avenues lined with colourful flowers and exotic trees. At focal points of the ideal town would be located expansive squares, places where harmonious people would congregate for joyful holidays and public carnivals. It was this model of a Sun City that was taken as the basis for the post-war reconstruction of Minsk.

The body of old Minsk was traversed by wide avenues called ‘prospects’, the principal axis of which became Prospect Stalin (now Prospect Skoriny) one of the longest streets in Europe, stretching for all of 15 kilometres. On this main street are a chain of huge squares, perpendicular from which lead off a further series of impressive streets. The central urban space was filled with an endless series of palaces, whose construction was undertaken by the finest Soviet architects of the time. These were not palaces in the traditional sense, but rather what might be termed ‘people’s palaces. In fact, all they took from classical palaces was the grandeur of their external decoration, while on the inside they were nothing more than apartment buildings containing many flats. Around each of these palaces, a little park with sculptures, sometimes fountains and occasionally evening a little outdoor theatre could normally be found. We might tentatively propose to call the style of these Minsk palaces ‘Stalinist Empire’. In opposition to the strict rules of classical Empire, this style is marked by a much freer relationship with the architectural languages of past epochs. For those building the Great Utopia had no doubt that the aesthetic of happiness should include all that they considered the greatest architectural achievements of pre-communist culture. Therefore the stylistic palette of Stalinist Empire runs the whole gamut of classical architectures, which had as their canonical models ancient Greek and Roman architecture, but also includes elements of baroque, renaissance and even ancient Egyptian architecture.

The unique specificity of Minsk's 'People's Palaces' lies in the fact that they are palaces on the surface only. The rich veneer of the palaces' facades is quite simply stuck onto the front of the building. The decadent abundance of forms, drawn as it were on one side of a piece of paper, immediately vanishes the moment you turn the piece of paper over. This creates an astonishingly surreal visual experience: the endless corridors of these apparent palaces are in fact decorations built into one wall. Just take a step to the side and you are in a totally different world. The surreal impression grows stronger when you move away from the centre of the city toward the periphery. Here the superficial, but always complete decoration starts to give way to fragments of decoration. The ensemble no longer creates the illusion of palaces, just symbolically gestures towards them. On a building might be seen a mark or some sort of added detail, which is called on to communicate to us symbolically that what we see is in fact a palace. This extra detail might be just a few highly decorated windows, a portal or simply a few columns that appear in front of an incompletely stuccoed wall, sometimes in the most surprising places.

In practice, the project of building a Sun City turned out to be more that of the decoration of a Sun City. Reality changed the script. The sculptures that are to be found in abundance in the spaces between the palaces, the figures of athletes, copies of Greek statues, women with oars, bears, deer and images of other animals, which were meant to symbolise the unity of all living nature in the coming communist paradise, in fact remained nothing more than plaster moulds. This provided ample opportunity for those disharmonious people still to be found here and there, even in those days, to abuse them, breaking off arms or noses, painting them different colours or simply covering them with abusive graffiti.

However, the spectator for whom this wonderful scenography was really intended was not supposed to notice the illusory nature of the proceedings. For, in actual fact, the person that these magnificent, but surface-thick palaces were seeking to communicate with was not someone who was actually going to inhabit them. Rather it was someone entering Empire through this magnificent triumphal arch; someone who, travelling along these fifteen kilometre long imperial gateways, was supposed to fall to their knees in reverence at the grandeur and might of this Empire. The paradox of this story is that the triumphant architecture here is a far stronger expression of Empire than can be found at its centre. Moscow, in contradistinction to the previous Empire capital Saint Petersburg, on account of its utterly omnivorous growth and total eclecticism, has never managed to create the impression of an Empire aesthetic. It remains a gigantic, certainly, but stylistically fairly amorphous conurbation.

Just a few years ago, on a fine summer's day, at the very same spot where in 1067 the bloody battle of Nemiga had taken place, the sky suddenly clouded over and sent a wall of rain pouring down on the people having fun at a street festival below. In the ensuing panic 54 people died, the majority of them girls between 14 and 16 years of age. Perhaps this too was the machinations of some evil spirit of empire which is enjoying itself at the expense of our city and through some mystical witchcraft has cast a spell over this country and this town…