Mid-century Soviet architecture provokes a binary reaction. There are those who find its modernism disgusting and inhumane, and then there are people like me who find it enticingly beautiful. The difference is whether you are looking at “Khrushchyovkas” – the low-cost housing developments – as buildings or as social tools.

Seen merely as a building, they are admittedly full of uniformly flat panels and dreary colours, with the same five-storey buildings dotted uniformly across Minsk and Vladivostok. But seen through the lens of a tool, these buildings were something much greater: they were the state’s apparatus for growing the economic pie that enriched Soviet people. Though small and ugly, they ended the many-families-under-one-roof curse in the most transformative rehousing programme in modern history. And it left pretty much everybody happy – why would people object to such an enormous housing project that made almost everyone better off?

The beauty in Soviet domestic architecture lies in its sheer scale. The government’s ability to industrialise urban development by building small towns – including schools, transport, healthcare facilities – to accommodate housing is what is beautiful. The Soviet government acknowledged that dignity wasn’t just in being housed, but in the community and lifestyle that could be created by having the facilities exactly where they are needed.

Fourteen hundred miles west of Minsk, and nearly 70 years later in Dunsink, Co Dublin, hundreds of people are objecting to a much more aesthetically pleasing version of a Government’s attempt to give 46,000 people the freedom to live in their own home, mostly in apartment blocks of up to 15 storeys tall.

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