Brutal, grandiose, dysfunctional, doomed. The hotels of the Soviet Union mirrored its own ethos and its own demise.
For Socialist Hotels, another gem from the art and architecture publisher Fuel, Berlin-based photographer Elena Amabili has visited more than 150 establishments in 31 countries and states, from Abkhazia to Uzbekistan. The vast majority of the facades and interiors she captures are monumental in scope, with a rigid order to their geometry. Here are modern landmarks, supposed palaces of the people, edifices built for awe and control, in the manner of a medieval Gothic cathedral.
by Elena Amabili,
Ostensibly operated by friendly- and independent-sounding companies like Russia’s Intourist or Poland’s Orbis, the imposing hotels were state-run and some of their names left little doubt as to who was really in charge: there were Hotel Moskvas in Belgrade, Budva, Sofia and Simferopol as well as in Moscow itself. Intourist hotels were a front for the KGB, staffed by informants, with tapped rooms and bugged phones.
In her excellent introduction, Caroline Eden writes of Tallinn’s Hotel Viru, where even the sauna was wired for sound. “The hotel had over 400 rooms and 23 floors, but the lift only went as far as the 22nd. That’s because the 23rd floor was entirely given over to a KGB listening centre, a surveillance hub with a direct line to Moscow, that was used to spy on guests who were not only foreign tourists but also business people, journalists and diplomats.” After the fall of communism, Intourist was privatised and bought by Thomas Cook; the Hotel Viru’s 23rd floor is now a KGB museum.
The rooms, restaurants and reception areas Amabili captures are empty and carry a heavy vibe of the Overlook Hotel in winter. But look for a moment and you are Jack Torrance at the ballroom party.
For a moment, you can live in a time when these halls teemed with staff sporting crisp uniforms and military demeanour, when dignitaries gazed from the curved concrete balconies of their suites to the silent cities below, when apparatchiks held hushed conversation in the bars, when tourists from other Iron Curtain states gaped at the murals before climbing between crisply starched sheets, when money-changers and sex workers lurked in the shadows, waiting for their moments. All of them utterly certain that here was the Soviet future, and they would be living in it for ever.
Socialist Hotels by Elena Amabili is published by FUEL Publishing and available at fuel-design.com
