"When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain inhabited, populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism. Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Recalling the work of W.G. Sebald and Rebecca Solnit, Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces, and secret policemen's castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant-garde ever dared. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communism--what residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life? "-- Provided by publisher.

1. The Tsar's grand boulevard, Nevsky Prospekt, St.Petersburg(1959 postcard)

2.Montwill-Mirecki Estate, Lodz, built by the Polish socialist Party in 1928
3.The wintry monumentalism of Engelsplatz, Vienna
4.The Exhibition of Economic Achievements, Moscow(1969 postcard)
5.Well-Scrubbed social democracy in Vallingby, Sweden
6.Welcome to Bulgaria : Ruse
7.The Mayakovsky Statue, , Moscow(1960s postcard)
8.The Stretched classicism of Mossover(1955 postcard)
9.Potemkin city : Bryusa Lane, Moscow
10.The New Brutalist Centipede-Moscow
11.Workers and domes: detail on the estate on Wberwiese, Berlin
12.TheTwin Towers of the Frankfurter Tor, Berlin
13.Themodernist Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin (1969 postcard)
14.The Kreschatyk meets October Revolution Square in Kiev(1979 Postcard)
15.The transformed Maidan seen from Kreschatyk, Kiev, Spring 2014
16.Barricades and the Stalinist Baroque in Kiev, Spring 2014
17.A blocked archway in Kiev, Spring 2014
18.Baroque lamps on constitution square, warsaw (1955 postcard).
19.Colonnades at MDM, Warsaw
20.Singed Gay Pride rainbow at saviour square MDM, Warsaw etc.