“How would you like a high-rise building, just like one of ours, in Warsaw?” – Viacheslav Molotov (1952)
An appropriately functional entrance ticket.
At two hundred and thirty-one metres high the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science is one of the most notorious examples of Soviet Realist architecture of the 1950s and you can’t miss it because it is the tallest building in Poland and the eighth highest in the European Union. It was commissioned by Josef Stalin as a gift from the people of the Soviet Union.
What a great gift!
Actually, not only Warsaw but similar gifts were given to Prague, Bucharest, Kiev and Riga. How lucky were Berlin and Budapest to miss out.
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Have Bag, Will Travel 
Are those booths all that’s left of Joe’s statue?
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I cheated with this one. The statue of the boots is in Budapest. After the collapse of Soviet Russian domination in Eastern Europe, Stalin’s statue was toppled and destroyed. The boots remain as a symbol of oppression. Clever, don’t you think?
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You’re certainly right that you can’t miss it! I’ve not been to Warsaw apart from to transit from the airport to Krakow for work back in a previous job, and it towers over everything. I could not decide whether I liked it or not. I still can’t. It has a certain deranged presence and grandeur, and it definitely redefines the term “communist bloc(k)”, whatever else it does.
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I went to Moscow in 2012 and the tour operator and the guide thought that it was important to see all seven of these monster in the city!
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I have been to the country and others including the USSR, all typical soviet buildings !
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Do you like them?
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no way never did I was born into that unfortunately
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“How lucky were Berlin and Budapest to miss out.” Laughing, Andrew.
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