Concrete Ambitions: How the Eastern Bloc Built Its Cities in the 1970s
By the early 1970s, the Eastern Bloc had a housing problem it could not talk its way out of. Postwar migration to cities across Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself had outpaced construction for two decades, and planners in Moscow, Warsaw, and East Berlin faced the same arithmetic: too many workers, too few apartments, and a political system that had promised both full employment and a home for every family. The response was one of the largest urban-construction efforts in modern European history, and its architectural, social, and administrative scars are still visible today.
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Did the Soviets Avoid the Early Collapse of the Iron Curtain?
In the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet influence in Romania was very strong. The USSR controlled the country’s economy and political life. That was completely expected since the new government after the end of the Cold war was pro-Soviet. The first serious efforts to bring back sovereignty appeared in the 1960s. The communist government of Romania wanted to become economically independent and release the country from the covert and overt Soviet actions that made this country a satellite state under the strong control of the USSR. Therefore, regarding international relations, these two countries weren’t in equal position. The USSR had the power over Romania. And Romania wanted to make its own decisions. So, Soviet informal controls needed to be stopped.
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