The story of architecture under the peculiar, now long-dead system that is today called (but never called itself) communism is generally considered a story of sad decline. After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, there was more than a decade of experimentation, spurred both by the possibilities of the new system (land nationalisation was popular with architects) and the hopes of world revolution and a new communal society it engendered. It ended in the 1980s with the construction of cities ringed with block after block of apartments, like the housing estates of the west but bigger and more monolithic. If it began with images of technology as fantasy and liberation – such as Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Monument to the Third International, an impossible, high-tech structure housing the Comintern in revolving glass rooms encased by an Eiffel Tower-like steel skeleton – then it passed in the 1940s through images of authoritarianism and naked power, such as the neo-baroque Tower of Babel at Moscow State University, concluding with entire districts accomodating hundreds of thousands of people constructed from identical concrete panels. This is only part of the story, however, scraping the surface of the hopes and ideas inspired by the 20th-century communist project. The following five projects tell a story more complex than hope/dictatorship/stagnation. Some of them do still offer flashes of a possible future beyond capitalism; others are products of the unrepeatable peculiarities of the Soviet system.

1. Konstantin Melnikov, Rusakov Workers’ Club, Moscow, 1927

Although images of Tatlin’s unbuildable Monument circulated round Europe, the first viable post-revolutionary structure to be seen outside the USSR was the young architect Konstantin Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 Paris Expo. In an exposition otherwise dominated by academic classicism, Melnikov’s design, which yoked together angular glass spaces, slogans and signage, was pointedly egalitarian, containing a mock workers’ club with furniture by Aleksandr Rodchenko. On the basis of this success, Melnikov was commissioned by Moscow’s local trade unions to build a series of actual workers’ clubs, near several factories in the Soviet capital’s industrial suburbs.

The most famous of these is the Rusakov Club, in the Sokolniki district of northern Moscow, which was built for the employees of the Moscow Tram Workers’ Union. Workers’ clubs were peculiar revolutionary versions of the working men’s clubs familiar in the west, and had been set up in converted buildings since before 1917. To build one anew meant responding to the many different functions they performed – they were used as theatres, cinemas, cafes and for night classes. Melnikov managed to fit this all in by arranging the seats of the Rusakov Club’s central theatre into three chambers, which protrude from the facade like punching fists. This dramatic, dynamic design is still borrowed by radical architects today.

From 1929, the trade unions were heavily repressed, and workers clubs were replaced with more grandiose Palaces of Culture. Melnikov’s career ended in 1934, and he lived out a marginalised life in his self-designed house on Moscow’s Arbat. A totally renovated Rusakov Club was reopened a few months ago, with its restored slogan “Trade Unions – the School of Communism” seeming a peculiar joke in the capitalist metropolis.

2. Vladimir Meduna, Gateway to Ostrava-Poruba, Ostrava, 1953

Photograph: Alamy

Stalin embarked on a “Great Change”, sometimes called the “Great Retreat”, in the 1930s, industrialising the USSR and crushing most revolutionary experimentation as petit-bourgeois utopianism. This had drastic effects on architecture. In 1932, a central Palace of the Soviets won an architectural competition with a “wedding cake” design that applied classical symmetry to the dimensions of the Empire State Building, and topped it with a statue of Lenin. For the next 25 years, the USSR built in an expensive, opulent and frequently bizarre neo-baroque style, full of ornamentation, statuary and grandiloquent effects. Its ideas were summed up by the commissar of enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky as “the people’s right to colonnades”. After 1948, this was exported to the satellite countries of east and central Europe, as the only acceptable form of socialist architecture, and elsewhere has been condemned as representing one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in history.

Perhaps appropriately, one of the most mind-boggling examples of Stalinist architecture is a very long way from Moscow, on the outskirts of the Czech industrial city of Ostrava. This new settlement, Poruba, was built for miners and steelworkers on a grand scale – tree-lined boulevards, housing complexes and palaces of culture, all in walking distance from the factory. This was traditional 19th-century urbanism blown up to heroic proportions. There are several similar instant Stalinist cities, from Magnitogorsk in the Urals to Nowa Huta in Poland and Dunaújváros (originally, Sztálinváros) in Hungary, but none really compares to Poruba in its demented grandeur. The entryway to the district from the south is a long neoclassical circus, around a tree-lined green. The building contains hundreds of spacious, high-ceilinged workers’ flats, with a spiked baroque tower at one end, and in the middle, an overscaled triumphal arch with flats and heroic-worker sculptures above it. Gross as it may be, it is utterly compelling, a freakish combination of Bath, Tsarist St Petersburg and Gotham City, and an image of undoubted propagandistic power.

3. Wojciech Pietrzyk, Arka Pana Church, Nowa Huta, 1967

Photograph: Alamy

Nowa Huta, erected to serve a steelworks just outside Kraków, is Poland’s equivalent to Poruba, a showpiece Stalinist project of boulevards and colonnades constructed in the early 50s by Stakhanovite labour. Like Poruba, Magnitogorsk and their ilk, this was a town without a church, which might not have been a problem in a largely irreligious country such as Czechoslovakia, where the communists were voted in at the ballot box, but it became an issue in devout, largely anti-communist Poland. The town was finished in the mid-50s, but the population of Nowa Huta – especially after the 1956 “thaw”, when a less Soviet-dominated leadership took control of Poland – began to demand a church. A space was reserved, but nothing was built there for years, with the protests sometimes escalating into violence. Rattled, the local authorities permitted the design of the Arka Pana church. Construction began in 1967 and it was formally opened 10 years later by the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla, soon to be made Pope John Paul II.

The story of the devoutly Catholic Poles bringing down communism via prayer and trade unions is a familiar one, wearingly so in contemporary Poland, where the church’s power is resented by many younger people. But Arka Pana is not a reactionary building; it’s a structure full of confidence and modernity. The painstaking pebbled-concrete facade, formed of several curved, billowing spaces, encloses an airy, informal interior, with beautifully made bespoke furniture and artworks. In many ways it resembles an ecclesiastical version of the palaces of culture of the era, but rather than communism replacing religion, the reverse has occurred, and the architects of the Catholic church have used the same communal spatial effects as Melnikov to perpetuate the old church. The result remains deeply moving, centred around a tortured Christ, a stark image of pain and horror in contrast to the welcoming warmth of the building.

4. Tamara Chelikovska and Mykola Alyoshkin, Palats Ukrayina Metro Station, Kiev, 1984

The story of the Moscow Metro is well‑known, and in many ways it is the least disputed of Stalin’s palaces for the people, with neoclassical halls forming the hub of one of the world’s biggest and most efficient public transport systems. As with most Stalinist projects, the conditions in which it was built were brutal, resulting in innumerable casualties; from 1938 until 1956, it made extensive use of forced labour, but the sheer beauty of its construction seems to win over even the sharpest critics. Waiting for your train in a cathedral-like space lined by porphyry, chrome and labradorite, stained glass, gold leaf and marble statuary is an unforgettable experience, and as a result these are often the least altered Soviet spaces – everyone knows that the Metro is special. What is less known is that this approach was exported, and similarly breathtaking metros can be found in a dozen ex-Soviet cities from St Petersburg to Tashkent, and outside the former USSR in Prague and Bucharest. One of the most remarkable is in the Ukrainian capital.

The first line of the Kiev Metro, completed in 1960, is a little like a miniaturised version of the Moscow Metro – stations such as Universitet and Vokzalna are still far more impressive than any underground station in the west – but the budget for mosaics and marbles was cut as a result of Khrushchev’s decrees against Stalinist excess. Further lines completed in the 1970s and 80s have a cold, opulent grandeur that easily matches the original – culminating in the neo-Byzantine Zoloti Vorota station. Palats Ukrayina – originally Red Army station and renamed after 1991 – is Futurist, each of its pillars lined in a shimmering red and black abstract mosaic pattern. At the end of the hall, a mosaic depicts a Red Guard during the 1918 Arsenal Uprising, a suppressed Bolshevik insurrection; the figure is surrounded by flying abstract shapes, which seem to have escaped from the Suprematist paintings of the same era.

5. Gunter Stahn, Nikolaiviertel, East Berlin, 1987

Postmodernism was meant to be something that happened only in the west – “the cultural logic of late capitalism”, as Fredric Jameson called it, an “end of history” style to accompany the triumph of neoliberalism and privatisation. Curiously, though, many of its ideas – for example, the view that modernism ignores the desires of the masses – were anticipated under Stalin in the 1930s, and some Soviet satellite states were early adopters of postmodernism. The German Democratic Republic had one of the largest industrialised housing programmes ever seen, in which practically everything was made out of mass-produced concrete panels. This is referenced in the Nikolaiviertel, a large postmodernist housing estate in the centre of Berlin, which emulates the scale and style of old Berlin using the same corrugated concrete components as a suburban tower-block estate.

The result is bizarre, kitsch and rather enjoyable; it’s fully aware of its own absurdity. Concrete arcades fan out from the restored Nikolaikirche, with concrete gables, concrete columns and archways, all made from the familiar panels. Pass through those archways, and you could be in any estate anywhere in east-central Europe, with children’s playgrounds and trees surrounded by concrete blocks. A relief sculpture on one facade depicts the history of the German workers’ movement, and culminates with workers constructing tower blocks from exactly the same panels. It seems like a strange way to imagine the forward march of labour – and we all know what happened two years after its construction – but also suggests that the communist economy and ideology had more potential for irony and adaptation than we might give it credit for. Here is the first, and last, state-socialist housing scheme that was intended to be funny.

• Owen Hatherley’s Landscapes of Communism is published by Allen Lane.