--- On Tue, 6/9/09, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] socialist realism tour
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 8:18 AM
>
> Have you ever been to VDNKh in Moscow?
[WS:] Long time ago, if memory serves. I have not been to Moscow since I turned 17.
However VDNKh is more of an imperial style architecture - replicating royal residences. By contrast, the MDM (which translates Marshall street Residential District) - where my pics were takes - was a commercial-residential area designed for ordinary proles and featured art that venerated proletarian work. It is an interesting twist because "bourgeois" architecture of pre-communist era often featured human shapes as a decorative element - but these were either mythological figures. Socialist realist design used the general concept but changed its symbolic contents to reflect "material reality" instead of "bourgeois mythology."
Wojtek