I am an architect and I was born in an Eastern bloc country. The Soviets had far-reaching urban plans, but they consisted of tearing down bourgeois historic urban fabric and establishing a "New Order" of widening streets and erecting brutal monuments that have nothing to do with beauty. In Socialist realism, the place of acanthus leaves on columns was replaced by cabbage and sugar beet leaves, and instead of figures from mythology and history, the facade was decorated with sculptures of labor leaders, members of the Communist Party, Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. .

Often brick buildings were utility buildings or factories because plastering was associated with an additional cost, although there were exceptions as neo-Gothic churches where the architectural detail was carefully arranged brick and stonework. After 1918, when Poland regained independence, brick buildings were associated with the tsar's possessive power, and to mark independence, great plastering began. Several Orthodox churches were also demolished on this occasion.