Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful. The Poles notoriously loathed the Palace of Culture and Science that was the gift to war-ruined Warsaw from the Soviet elder brother or – as the Poles saw it – master. Foreigners and sophisticated Russians sneered at Moscow’s wedding-cake buildings and lamented the old Tverskaya that had undergone a Stalinist remake as Gorky Street. Some people cherished the onion domes of 17th-century Muscovy, others the grand classical façades of 18th-century St Petersburg, and a few even idolised the dilapidated remnants of 1920s Constructivism in Moscow, but there was a general consensus that Stalinism of the 1930s-50s was the pits. I was one of those trekking around Moscow in the late 1960s, a worn copy of P.V. Sytin’s 850-page From the History of Moscow Streets in hand, to see what monstrous acts had been committed against innocent buildings in Stalin’s time. I don’t know how Sytin ever got that book published. It first came out in 1948, illustrated with smudgy non-glossy photographs, light grey on the yellowing pages, with new editions in 1952 and 1958, each adding hundreds of pages of street by street and building by building close description. I suppose the censor accepted it as a celebration of Stalinist transformation, even if the intelligentsia read it as a lament for the pre-Revolutionary imperial Russian past. It’s been reprinted several times since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but who knows in what spirit of Stalinist nostalgia people read it these days. Now, Owen Hatherley tells us, the Poles actually like their Palace of Culture.

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Reading the book, I felt sure that Hatherley had done most of his travelling in summer because, despite his affection for Stalker, he seems relatively unaffected by the sense of existential insignificance, exacerbated by cold, that the vast empty spaces of Stalinist city planning can induce. For me, the quintessential meaningless Soviet space was the illegible void between Manezh and the National, Metropol and Moscow hotels near Red Square. (Now it’s bad in a different way, with multiple lanes of traffic shooting through en route to somewhere else, and a vast commercial mall underground.) As my Sytin told me, the illegibility was the result of the wholesale destruction of the streets and houses that used to make sense of the space, the result, that is, of a violent, apparently purposeful activity that wasn’t in any real sense planned. I took that as a metaphor for a lot of things in the Soviet Union.

Hatherley has a tough-minded approach to huge empty spaces, although he acknowledges that crossing them can be daunting. He views my bête noire, the 1960s-modern Kalinin Prospekt, with relative equanimity, finding it a plus that its wide pavements, lined by ‘ridiculously priced department stores’, bring in the crowds. Old Arbat, running parallel, has kept its early 19th-century buildings mainly intact in what is now a kitschy pedestrian zone where foreign tourists buy matryoshka dolls and drink beer. The (post-Stalinist) ruin of the Arbat was a great cause of intelligentsia outrage in late Soviet times, but it’s typical of Hatherley’s sensibility and frame of reference that this doesn’t even rate a mention; it’s not his form of nostalgia.

Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in Berlin is more in his line, a monster that can inspire admiration and disapproval at the same time. Hatherley nails it as ‘by its very existence an indictment of the vainglory, hypocrisy and dubious claims to “socialism” of the Soviet-backed state’ but can’t deny ‘that every time I have visited it I’ve found it hugely exhilarating’. He compares it to the Paris boulevards, and finds that it expresses ‘a socialism with real generosity and grandeur, all its hierarchical features subordinated to the rule of the public’s footsteps’. The street may be too wide for pedestrian comfort, but at least it is a street, and a ‘surprisingly convincing’ one.

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Hatherley is obsessed by the socialist city, and whether parts of it got built, or ever will be. This ideal socialist city is, of course, quite different from the ‘real socialist city’ that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc produced. It’s a utopian future that never arrived; an archaic modernism, like Grand Central Parkway in New York, evoking brief pangs of nostalgia as you zip out to the airport. But there’s another part of Hatherley that can forget socialism and simply revel in the weird transmogrifications of the Stalinist architectural aesthetic – for example, in Shanghai, where ‘Le Corbusier meets Lev Rudnev meets neoliberal bling, the Stalinist city gone high tech, its pinnacles and swags slathered in neon.’

The China excursion, which comes as a kind of coda at the end of the book, is a surprise, but underlines one of the book’s most valuable aspects, its illumination of a Soviet cultural empire whose imperial motifs were repeated, transposed and subverted all along a far-flung periphery. The scholarly world has been slow to develop this theme. True, the concept of ‘empire’ came to the fore when the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc collapsed into their constituent national parts, but most of the ensuing scholarship focused on the recovery/reinvention of the national. It’s works like this one, closer to pop culture and addressed to a broader audience, that most successfully demonstrate the cultural commonalities that – as with the British and French colonial empires – outlived the imperial institutions that created them.

The Soviet cultural empire, however, is something of an odd case, in that the Moscow metropolis didn’t always succeed in imposing its aesthetic will, hard though it tried, because of the Eastern Europeans’ strong sense that Russia was ‘backward’ in comparison with them, a sense that the Russian intelligentsia to some degree accepted. Thus the cultural traffic ran both ways, and some roads in the Soviet cultural empire led not to Moscow, but to Berlin, Warsaw and Prague...