Anyone who spends any length of time in Warsaw cannot remain indifferent to the Palace of Culture and Science. Grotesquely outsized (231 metres in height, 212 metres in width at the base) and unambiguously phallic, the tower (surrounded by a vast and windswept ‘Parade Square’) is impaled into the belly of Poland’s capital. A ‘gift’ from Comrade Stalin to the Polish nation, the Palace was hoisted between 1952 and 1955 onto a sixty-acre plot then still strewn with ruins left over from the carnage of WWII.

Cambridge’s twentieth century has been gentler than Warsaw’s. Be that as it may, this twee town’s collegiate idyll has also been rudely interrupted by a solid exemplar of midcentury architectural totalitarianism. This week, Varsity reports on the UL: littler (a mere 48 metres high), older and less conspicuously central, but a blood-relative of the Warsaw Palace nevertheless. While in Warsaw on PhD fieldwork, I became seduced by the nooks, crannies and social life of this beastly but fascinating building. Now, as I fumble for the light switch among the North Front bookstacks, I thank George Gilbert Scott for making me feel a little bit at home.

The Palace’s entrance hall was once crowned by an enormous sculpture of two muscular proletarians locked in homoerotic embrace. Representing Polish-Soviet friendship, this was an early, “regime-friendly” work by top sculptor Alina Szapocznikow. In a charmingly philistine outburst typical of the profit-hungry loony years of early 90s Polish capitalism, the Palace’s then-director flogged the piece for the price of scrap metal to an entrepreneurial farmer, who came to pick it up on his pick-up truck under the cover of one night in 1992. Its plinth still stands, disconcerting visitors with its emptiness. Here, two middle-aged ladies on an ironic Stalinist nostalgia trip do their best to bring back the good old days.

Before scaling the phallus, let us briefly descend into its murky roots. The subterranean Palace is the subject of many urban legends (secret train lines to Moscow, evil nuclear bunkers, that sort of thing). The reality is a little more prosaic. Along with a poster of a malevolently-smirking Pope Ratzinger, a huge fishtank and a collection of empty beer cans, this calendar snap of a scantily clad lady fireperson adds a touch of colour to the windowless control room on Level -1. While the control room is alive with affable tall men with moustaches, who spend long shifts turning and pushing the giant dials and switches which direct the Palace’s Soviet-era infrastructure, a feline workforce of sixteen or so individuals scurry around the cellar corridors. They keep the Palace rodent-free, but their bodily outgoings ensure that a trip to the basement makes a lasting imprint on even the hardiest nostrils.

Reaching out like talons into the surrounding city are the Palace’s sprawling side wings. The biggest one accommodates Warsaw’s premier concert venue. Everybody from Miles Davis to Marlene Dietrich has graced this stage; here, Mick Jagger devoured a bunch of flowers during the Stones’ first ever Iron Curtain gig in 1967. The ‘Congress Hall’ was primarily designed to host the long and vodka-soaked conferences of the Polish United Workers’ Party: a hilariously Bond-villainesque mechanism would part the stage floor, revealing a 72-seat Praesidium that accommodated the plump buttocks of the biggest cheeses in the People’s Republic.

Another talon is reserved for the wonderfully anachronistic Museum of Technology, a perpetually unchanging cabinet of once-cutting-edge technological curiosities. A dissected model of the socialist-era motorisation stalwart, the Polish Mini Fiat, and a collection of cacti look out onto the building site of a 192-metre residential tower designed by Daniel Libeskind – one of the many wishful but ultimately doomed attempts to challenge the Palace’s dominance over Warsaw’s cityscape.

A massive chunk of the Palace is occupied by the Palace of Youth – a once highly prestigious site of extra-curricular inculcation for thousands of Warsaw’s brightest young things. Despite having lost much of its once lavish state funding, the talented and hopeful continue to flock to the Palace’s overstretched and rustically aging facilities, hoping to excel in fields as diverse as boat building, synchronised swimming, body-pumping and ballroom dancing.

The fourth-floor Rudnev Room is the venue for many open meetings on architecture and planning (the city’s Municipal Architects have their offices high up in the tower), to which members of the public flock for a chance to heckle and harangue decision-makers. In the aftermath of one such event, a group of irregularly-shaped attendees exchange invectives over a scale model of the future city centre, with the Palace still conspicuously slap-bang in the middle.

The marble-stuffed, stuccoed and columned halls on the 2nd and 4th floors are hired out for posh and opulent debauchery (by those who can afford to pay). In the photo above, a right-wing political journalist and his new wife cut their wedding cake. They chose the Palace for their ceremony to provoke their Communist-bashing friends.  The assembled conservatives, however, harmlessly jiggle around on the dance floor to socialist power ballads. They have sated themselves on liquor and a menu of ironic People’s Poland-style delicacies (cold stuffed hog, pickled herring, etc.)

Higher up, above all the politics and spectacle, are the unused terraces surmounting the Palace’s forbidding side towers, magnets for cigarette butts and pigeon shit. Yet these elaborate ramparts also provide a spectacular backdrop for brutality of Attenbourghian proportions. The highest reaches of the tower are home to a pair of famished and bloodthirsty peregrine falcons, who do their best to gorge and poke all they can out of the intrepid pigeons who dare wander into their domain. Come migrating season, the flying rats are joined by a morbid multitude of more exotic avian carcasses.

Nearby the Palace is Warsaw’s central railway station, a Mecca for the city’s densest concentration of bearded and pungent vagabonds and booze hounds. On a summer’s day, you could do worse on a trip to Warsaw than to strike up a conversation and raise a glass with one of these fellows as they recline in vacant statue niches, striking classical poses. All hail to Stalin’s Palace, may it forever fascinate and disturb us!