Palace of Culture and Science

This guide to the Palace of Culture and Science follows an unwanted gift: Joseph Stalin sent this skyscraper to the Polish people in the 1950s, and thousands of Soviet workers built it in barely three years, housed in a fenced-off wooden village on the edge of Warsaw. You'll hear about a poet who dared to call it a nightmare in public, the facade that once spelled out Stalin's name, and the workers who never made it home. It ends by asking how a city that Stalin's own army had leveled a decade earlier learned to live inside his monument.