Warsaw Warms to Soviet Landmark

The Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science still defines Warsaw’s skyline. It’s huge, gray and domineering -- just the message its communist creators intended when Poland was locked into the Soviet bloc.

But as the skyscraper had its 50th birthday on July 22, Poles seemed to have made peace with their unwanted architectural “gift.”

As the most prominent architectural symbol of the 45 years Poland spent under Soviet domination, the palace was deeply resented. After communism collapsed in 1989, there were calls to raze it. The popular 1991 film “Controlled Conversations” fantasized about its wedding-cake layers collapsing in a cloud of dust.

But Poland itself has changed, secure in its democracy and membership in NATO and the European Union.

“It was once seen as an ulcer on the healthy body of the city ... and as a symbol of Polish enslavement,” said Lech Isakiewicz, the director of the city-owned palace. “Now the number of people who want to tear it down or overshadow it with other buildings can be counted on one hand.”

“Time is really working in this building’s favor,” he said.

Isakiewicz and other building managers marked the birthday with the slogan “The Palace’s New Opening,” appealing to die-hards to put aside old resentments and embrace the building’s social utility and architectural flair.

But only about 200 people turned out to share a large palace-shaped birthday cake and enjoy live 1950s style music. Organizers blamed bad weather and the vacation season that had emptied the capital.

Built in Stalin’s name and inaugurated on July 22, 1955, two years after the Soviet dictator’s death, the 42-story palace rose over a city that had been largely reduced to rubble by the Nazis, and became its most important cultural and sports center.

With vast rooms of marble and granite that dwarf the individual, it is Poland’s tallest building and is almost a city in itself, filled with theaters, a conference center, a swimming pool and offices. Generations of Warsaw children have gone there for art classes. Socialist-era parades were regularly held on its square.

It soars 755 feet above the surrounding avenues of monotonous apartment blocks, vast green parks and modern glass office buildings that proclaim the new capitalist era.

That Poles seem more willing to appreciate the building’s kitschy flair signals quite a change from 1979, when dissident writer Tadeusz Konwicki called it “a monument to arrogance, a statue to slavery, a stone layer cake of abomination.”

The Stalin-era populace is dwindling, and playful attempts to subvert its original totalitarian spirit have helped the palace find its place.

“One shouldn’t simply view this as the Soviet Union’s ‘gift’ to Poland,” said Anita Bernatek, a 19-year-old student, as she strolled beneath it. “It is part of our history and should be viewed as such.”

Last year it was decorated in orange to show solidarity with Ukraine’s pro-democracy rallies -- a conscious effort to redefine the palace as a democratic symbol. It now has a Big Ben-style clock and an ice-skating rink, and the square hosts summer concerts.

Maria Wojtysiak is an architect who works to preserve the palace’s original decorative elements and has her office on its 16th floor. She’s lobbying to add the palace to a national register of historic sites in hopes of preserving its 1950s interior decor.

Designed by prominent Russian architect Lev Rudnev and resembling similar skyscrapers in Moscow, its craftsmanship is far superior to most of what goes up these days, Wojtysiak said. She expects that its “funny mix” of Soviet architecture and traditional Polish interior design will one day be respected as a style in its own right.

Isakiewicz believes that it is so embedded in Warsaw’s landscape that calling for its destruction is absurd.

“It’s like having a brother born out of wedlock,” he said. “You learn to either love him or hate him. But you’d have to be stupid to want to kill him.”