Totten interviews James Kirchick about the recent overthrow of Kyrgyzstan’s dictator here. Apparently it took about 5,000 people to bring down Bakiyev’s regime. Totten and Kirchick discuss Russia’s behind-the-scenes involvement in the coup. The Russian government, they say, was angry with the Bakiyev for allowing the U.S. to continue to have a transit center (don’t call it an “air base”) in the country after he received a Russian aid package.
Also, an older article of Totten’s that I finally read reflects on Romania 20 years after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu. Romanians, he writes, tend to be very pro-American (no matter who the president is) pro-NATO. They have troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan without any controversy. Totten also describes the urban landscape of Bucharest that was marred by Ceausescu:
Ceausescu’s communist urban planners chopped up Bucharest with a meat axe.
They pulled down most of the classical buildings that once made the city aesthetically pleasing, then they put up a bunch of crap in their place. The streets are too wide. Buildings don’t match, and sometimes there is far too much space between them. There isn’t much coherent fabric or feel to most of the city, even in most of the old city center. It is very nearly an antithesis of Paris.The brilliant Anthony Daniels, who now writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, loathes ghastly brutalist architecture as much as I do. He properly blames the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his baleful influence for wrecking so many once beautiful cities like Bucharest and even marring cities like London.
“Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform,” Daniels recently wrote in City Journal. “In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy.” Le Corbusier, he says, “was the enemy of mankind” and “does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism.”
The grotesque modern architect once described a house as “a machine for living in” and is still scandalously lionized by many professionals in the field even today. (Do such people stay in the asteroid belt of tower blocks in the suburbs of Paris when they visit on holiday, or do they prefer the beautiful parts of the city such as the Latin Quarter like normal human beings do?)
Corbu’s work and that of his disciples is hard on the eyes in Western cities, but it’s positively brutal in some of the formerly communist capitals. There you can see what all of Europe might have looked like if the man were able to convince Western leaders—as he tried to do—to raze their cities and let him start over.
No sector in Bucharest survived communism intact, and just a handful of streets look like the Europe most of us know. The vast majority of the traditional buildings left standing are wedged now between shoddy modernist blocks, and entire neighborhoods beyond the city center consist almost entirely of dreary public housing units that don’t even meet Corbu’s dismal standards.
On the other hand, the architecture outside of Bucharest has often survived. Check out both posts for some good pictures of bad communist architecture, too. Here’s another of his posts with pictures of post-Communist countries (the Romanian pictures are the same as in the article above).
Tempora Christiana 