Brutal reminders of the past

The Humanitas bookstore was unloading some of their backlog at half price, so I picked up an Architectural and Cultural Guide to Pyongyang and a Taschen photo book of Soviet Brutalist architecture.  Not that I'm a big fan of either, but it is interesting to look into the dark side.  

Brutalism has seen quite a revival in recent years with major efforts to preserve some of the more famous surviving buildings from the era.  Our sports palace remains as forlorn as ever.  There have been numerous plans to restore it, but so far it hasn't happened.  Each time we drive by it, my wife points out how much it looks like Chandigarh from the backside.  A little bit, I guess, but not so much that I have any particular affinity for it.  I just remember taking our kids to see Riverdance and the Shaolin Kung Fu Masters there shortly before the auditorium was shut down for safety reasons.

It's not so much the architecture as it is the purpose of the building that gives it national prominence.  It was the venue for the Sajudis movement in the late 1980s, which eventually led to a declaration of independence on March 11, 1990.  A fine irony after 45 years of Soviet subjugation.  Most people don't realize that Lithuania had chosen to break away from the USSR long before January 13, 1991, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Vilnius to restore order.  At the time, only Moldova recognized Lithuania's independence.  My wife tells me how alone they felt, waiting on UN recognition that didn't come until September, 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight.   

Lithuanians had to endure numerous hardships.  Gorbačev may have preached perestroika and glasnost, but he had no intention of letting go of the Soviet Union.  He even came to Vilnius in 1990, hoping to appeal directly to the breakaway republic.  When that failed, he cut off gas supplies and transport services, hoping to freeze and starve Lithuanians into submission.  The only problem was that he had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and this harsh tactic didn't sit too well with Western leaders, so he finally relented and withdrew the tanks in late-January 1991.  Still, the economic sanctions persisted.  It was only when Boris Yeltsin, as the new Russia SR leader, stepped in and offered to renew economic ties with Lithuania in March that Gorbačev was forced to give up the illusion of a unified Soviet front.

The city struggled for over a decade to find its economic footing.  During this time, the old sports palace served as a basketball stadium and concert hall, as it was the biggest indoor arena in the city, the whole country for that matter.  In 2003, The Lithuanian national basketball team won Eurobasket, which it hadn't done since the interwar years.  The winning country generally gets to host the next biannual championship.  City officials hastily built a new arena, but it didn't meet European standards, so the honor fell to Poland.  The old sports palace was closed down, the pool drained, and graffiti artists given free rein. 

For the Jewish community, the sports palace represents yet another brutal remainder of an attempt to erase its history.  Russian authorities had closed the oldest Jewish cemetery on the site in 1831, and erected a fort in its place.  I'm not sure how long the fort lasted but in the mid 1960s the Soviets decided to build a sports hall along with a football stadium, Olympic-size swimming pool and diving tower on the site.  According to an architectural historian I know, the cemetery was actually where the pool is now, not the sports hall, but that didn't stop the local Jewish community from planting hundreds of headstones in front of the sports palace as if to mark their territory.  This legal battle has dragged out for over a decade, bringing in Jewish communities from around the world in support of the Litvak community.  Another friend of mine tried to pull me into this battle but I politely said no.   

For me, it would make more sense to build a new cultural center on the site.  One that celebrated the cosmopolitan nature of the city, but I'm very much in the minority on this one.  So, I just keep quiet.

There are other examples of Soviet Brutalism around the city, mostly in the vast housing blocks on the outskirts.  The director of HBO's Chernobyl filmed many of the domestic scenes in one of these housing blocks.  They were pretty much the same wherever you went in the Soviet Union. This resulted in the wonderfully wry holiday comedy, The Irony of Fate, where a guy gets drunk, boards the wrong plane and ends up in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), only to find that his key fits into the door of a flat with the same street address and flat number as his in Moscow.

However, the Taschen book shows that the Soviets could come up with some pretty astounding examples of Brutalism after Stalin kicked the bucket. Koba wasn't a big fan of modern architecture.  He preferred things along classical lines, albeit on a monumental scale.  Sadly or not so sadly, the Palace of the Soviets was never built.  Instead, we got a bunch of little palaces in its place, dubbed "Stalin's gifts."

For me, these Soviet-era buildings are all intrusions in the city.  In many cases, Soviet planners wiped out earlier buildings to make room for the new boulevards and municipal buildings they imagined.  Of course, they claimed the older buildings had been destroyed in WWII, but a local publisher uncovered a number of historic photos in the Library of Congress that showed that most of the lost buildings were very much intact, including the Great Synagogue of Vilna, after the war.  The great synagogue was razed to make way for a primary school in the 1960s.   The Soviets cleared the area along the river, essentially turning it into a dead space.  Recently, the city has tried to reclaim some of this riverfront and make it into a recreation area.  I've been running along the river for years and am glad to see this revitalization finally taking place. I don't trip over potholes anymore.

I suppose at some point the city will finally get the sport hall out of legal limbo and carry through their long deferred plans, much to the chagrin of the local Jewish community.  There are plans to make a suitable memorial to the cemetery on the site.  We'll see how it goes.