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. .