by https://x.com/BrivaelFr adapted from French to English using Google Gemini 3.1 Pro

Communist ideology breeds ugliness. It’s not a side effect, it’s in its DNA. Let me explain.

This ugliness isn’t an accident. It’s not a lack of budget. It’s not incompetence. It’s a weapon. And the Soviet regime deployed it with surgical precision for 70 years.

To understand, you have to go back to the 1920s. Right after the revolution, the USSR had brilliant architects. Russian constructivism was one of the most radical avant-gardes of the 20th century. Melnikov, Tatlin, the Vesnin brothers. Visionaries.

Stalin silenced them all. Not because they were bad. Because they were too good. A visionary architect is an individual who imposes their vision on the world. And an individual who imposes their vision on the world is exactly what collectivism cannot tolerate.

From the 1930s onwards, everything came under the control of the State Committee for Construction. A single body decided everything. The blueprints. The materials. The dimensions. The colors. Everything was standardized. Everything was identical. From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, across 9 time zones, the exact same block.

And that’s where the evil genius of the whole thing appears. The regime understood something that most people still don’t see: the physical environment programs psychology. You shape the space, you shape the man living in it.

A beautiful building produces a very specific effect. It gives you the feeling that the place you live in has value. That you have value. That your daily life deserves attention, care, and detail. Architectural beauty is a mirror that tells you, “You are somebody.”

The Soviet bloc does the exact opposite. It tells you every morning when you leave your home: you are nobody. You are a production unit housed in a functional module. Your apartment is identical to that of 10 million other people. You are interchangeable. You are replaceable.

The Khrushchyovkas. Those 5-story buildings made of prefabricated panels that Khrushchev had built by the millions starting in 1955. Expected lifespan: 25 years. It’s 2026 and millions of Russians still live in them. The temporary became permanent. As always with the State.

No entrance hall worthy of the name. No crafted facades. No usable balconies. No color variation. The bare minimum needed to store human bodies between two shifts at the factory. It’s not housing. It’s warehousing.

Hayek described the mechanism in The Road to Serfdom. The central planner cannot tolerate diversity because diversity is information they don’t control. Every different facade is a local decision that escapes the plan.

Beauty is decentralized by nature. It is born when an artisan adds a detail nobody asked for. When an owner chooses a color they like. When an architect takes a risk. Beauty is the free market applied to stone.

Look at any European city built before the 20th century. Paris, Prague, Vienna, Lisbon. Every building is different. Every facade tells a story. Because every building had an owner, an architect, a patron with their own tastes, their ambitions, their ego.

Ego. That’s exactly the word. Soviet communism waged a total war against the human ego. And architecture was its most effective weapon because it’s the only one you can’t ignore. You can close a book. You can turn off the radio. You can’t not see the building you live in.

Girard would have loved analyzing this. Mimetic desire works through differentiation. You desire what sets you apart. A beautiful apartment, a beautiful facade, a neighborhood with character. Remove all difference and you remove the very mechanism of individual desire. You produce humans without aspirations.

That’s why the first cracks in the Soviet bloc appeared through aesthetics. Jeans. Rock music. Western magazines. Not because people wanted capitalism in theory. Because they wanted beautiful things. Beauty is the Trojan horse of individual freedom.

Quick side note for all the Marxist gamers on this app who spend their days raving over Japanese art. Manga, anime, RPGs, Miyazaki’s designs. Do you realize that all of this exists because free individuals were able to express a wild, personal artistic vision in a market economy? In your communist paradise, Akira Toriyama would have drawn propaganda posters for the Ministry of Agriculture, and Final Fantasy would have been a five-year plan simulator. But hey, keep sharing Berserk fan art between two threads about abolishing private property; the irony is delicious.

Now look at France. Look at our suburbs. The massive housing projects of the 60s and 70s. Sarcelles. Les Minguettes. La Courneuve. Guess who inspired the French urban planners of the time. Guess which model they went to study in Moscow and East Berlin.

Le Corbusier, the idol of post-war French urbanism, openly admired the Soviet plan. His Cité Radieuse is just a Khrushchyovka with better finishes. The principle is the same: the individual serving the module. The human fitting into the box.

And then we’re surprised that these neighborhoods produce violence, despair, and rage. You park people in ugliness for 50 years and you’re surprised when they break everything. Ugliness generates hate. Self-hate first. Hate for others next.

Conversely, look at what happens when you give beauty back to the people. Studies in environmental criminology are unanimous. You renovate a facade, you plant trees, you put in decent lighting, crime goes down. Not because the people change. Because the environment tells them, “This place has value, therefore you have value.”

Beauty is not a luxury. It is a fundamental right. It’s the first signal a society sends to its members to tell them: you are individuals, not units. You deserve better than the bare functional minimum.

Every time an urban planner tells you that the priority is density, functionality, and efficiency, remember where that rhetoric comes from. It comes from people who had a political interest in making sure you never felt at home. In making sure you were never anybody.

Ugliness is never neutral. It is always political. And those who defend it today in the name of pragmatism are continuing, consciously or not, the project of those who wanted to manufacture faceless men in soulless buildings.

Build beauty. Demand beauty. Beauty is an act of resistance against everything that wants to reduce you to a row in a spreadsheet.