Stalin believed that a subway system that was lavishly decorated reflected the priorities of a rational society. In his view a church is superstitious nonsense and it would be a waste of resources, but a subway station is actually useful, and a fine place for propaganda.
The subway stations in the US also serve an important role in society, but are funded as if they don’t. So when Raytheon wants to buy all the advertising space underneath Capital South metro station, or if Amazon wants to decorate the subway cars in fascist emblems, no one in charge wonders if that kind of agressive advertising serves a societal purpose. The metro system always needs money because it is perennially underfunded.
But, as the article iindicates, the “metro station as palace” idea died out with Khrushchev and Brezhnev. I would imagine that Stalin’s designs get dirty rather quickly.
Not if you read Russian, or have a good translated map. Then they are incredibly easy to navigate. The Moscow metro system was designed to move millions of people around the city daily in the absence of a car culture in a city where parts were built before non-biological locomotion was invented. It does this job admirably well (or did when I lived there).
“Supposed” applies to self-sufficiency as well as racial purity.
They don’t admire the starvation. They ignore it because they want to believe that the North Korean system works.
Many of these far-right figures adhere to Strasserism, a neo-fascist blend of pro-worker policies, xenophobia and socialist economics. They rarely mention the deep impoverishment of the North Korean economy, and if it is brought up, they put the blame on Western sanctions.
Well yeah, the commies put a heavy emphasis of architects working on public transport infrastructure because everyone outside of the politburo used them
As far as I know only the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Lineand the Filyovskaya Line, both from the 1950ies. Nuclear shelters would have been quite prescient for lines proposed in the 1920ies and constructed in the 1930ies and 1940ies. The option of Metro stations as air raid shelters may have been discussed in the 1930ies, but
a) Not before at least the civil war in Spain. Bombing cities full of non-combatants wasn’t a thing yet.
b) The early projects had a lot of input from specialists from the London tube (at least until the NKVD convinced itself that they were spies and had them deported back to Britain in 1933) who went for tunneling instead of cut-and-cover. The type of dirt to be tunnelled through, groundwater management, a river in the middle of the city and the need for stations and lines on multiple levels once the system would expand; parameters like that led to relatively deep tunnels.
c) When the Metro stations were used as air raid shelters during the siege of Moscow in 1941, it was a nice propaganda spin along the lines of “Comrade Stalin planned ahead for all eventualities. We cannot lose!”
Off-topic, but you need to choose “Copy video URL” not “Copy video URL at current time”, otherwise the video will start playing at the point where you paused it.
