A fifth of Berlin’s eastern inhabitants would like their Wall back and many more believe that life was better under the Communist regime of 15 years ago, according to a recent poll. Nostalgia for the old German Democratic Republic is well documented. It’s called “ostalgie” and whole television programmes are devoted to it.

And Germany is not the only country suffering from a growing collective longing for the black-and-white world of the Cold War. In London, the refurbished Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor Bar is a paean to Russian construc-tivism. Bold murals evoke the robust propaganda of Russian communism in its heyday and there is chunky, USSR-style furniture to match. Both Stolichnaya, the bar’s choice vodka, and the Pizza Hut chain have launched advertising campaigns using stylised graphics that have their source in the agitprop posters and movies of the VKhUTEMAS, Lenin’s idealistic art and design schools of the 1920s.

The French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton is advertising its new handbag with a beautifully shot photo of the former General Secretary Mikhael Gorbachev looking sultry in a limo driving alongside the Berlin Wall. And next year the Victoria & Albert Museum will host an exhibition dedicated to art and design in the Cold War.

I know that I find the sight of a magnificent Tupolev Tu-114 (with its Kuznetsov NK-12MV turboprops) exalting, but there’s something more general in the air. Given the irrational horrors of global terrorism, it is difficult now to remember being threatened by idealistic communism. On the contrary, we look back at a golden age of collective utopianism. I recently went to a party with vodka girls briskly dressed like Polish air hostesses circa 1959 in pert sky-blue uniforms with pencil skirts and socialist smiles: I thought I was in heaven already.

There was even a whiff of nostalgia surrounding the improbable movie hit of the year – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s German-language Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Its antihero, played by the late Ulrich Mühe, did for the Stasi and their terrible macs what American Graffiti did for General Motors and its chromed tail-fins: it made communism chic. We looked in fascination at the bleak scenography of von Donnersmarck’s Berlin and its grey inhabitants. The most touching detail in the film was how the Mühe character’s suit jacket, worn underneath his manmade-fibre bum-freezer windcheater, peeps out a little bit. Ridiculous, yes, but a detail evocative of both excess and incompetence. Erich Honecker’s and Horst Sindermann’s regime was tough, cruel and incompetent, but it was consistent.

And, thus, in its bizarre way it was stylish. While in the 1950s the West Germans coped with increasing prosperity by reconciling Platonic philosophy with fine art and industrial production to give us Gute Form, that chaste and epicene design philosophy that eventually resulted in the BMW 7-series, the Ossis were struggling to manufacture a coloured enamel bucket. Nostalgia for that simpler world affects the modern Germans too. On Wriezener Karre in the Mitte district of Berlin, a retro hotel (in period tangerine and lemon, possibly with some misunderstood plaid included somewhere) has recently opened. Called Ostel, it has a bad taste Stasi Suite for high-rollers, while low-rollers can opt for a €9-a-night bunk in a dormitory modelled on a Pioneer Camp. This is not a freakish one-off, but the first of a series of Ostels planned to satisfy in a plump and prosperous unified Germany yearning for the privations of yore.

When Paul Reilly, original impresario of what is now the Design Council, visited the Russian Exhibition of Economic Achievement in Moscow in the 1960s, he was horrified. A man schooled in the refinement of Swedish art-glass and Robin Day furniture, he could hardly believe the cack-handed cargo-cult horrors of the Soyuzelektropribor – televisions on wobbly legs and knobs with lost motion.

But a spate of recent books and exhibitions has begun to alter the assumption about Brezhnev-era ineptitude. In 2005 Bloomsbury published Off the Wall: Fashion from East Germany 1964-1980, lavishly illustrated with pert Interflug stewardesses posing in sculpted caps at the Schönefeld airport. And while modern Gucci-clad Russians feel only a sort of modified rapture about the Soviet era, an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture 1922-1932 is inspiring new respect for the revolutionary architecture of Leonard Vesnin, Konstantin Melnikov and Moisei Ginsberg.

But what more compelling evidence of the rehabilitation of communist design can there be than the renaissance in prestige (although that is not, perhaps, exactly the right word) of the Trabant car. This masterpiece of understated industrial kitsch was made of a thermosetting plastic called Duroplast. Also used to make the suitcases the Trabi so closely resembles, a version of Duroplast – manufactured by the resonantly named VEB Sachsen-ring Automobilwerke – is also used in some mouldings of the current BMW X1. Today, the latest BMW 7-series has a user’s manual that requires about 100 pages to explain the function of the on-board telephone. Thus the indestructible Trabi, with an engine less sophisticated than a Honda lawnmower’s, excites a keen nostalgia for a simpler life, like Lenin sitting at a camp table writing on rough newsprint and drinking from a tumbler made of bottle-glass.

In the end, Communist Chic is not so very different from the Western variety. As Daniel Bell said in The End of Ideology: “Capitalism . . . is a system wherein man exploits man . . . and Communism is vice versa.”

Communist design was always confused by the snare of consumerism. We look back at the Leipzig Messe of the 1950s with its heroic architecture, or Aeroflot’s brave attempts at corporate identity, with a sense of wonder at the innocence of it all. Lenin once declared that communism is “the power of the Soviets plus electricity”. By the late 1950s, with Khrushchev in power, the circumstances had changed. For President Eisenhower’s visit he ordered (to impress) an 8,000 horsepower speedboat designed by Yuri Soloviev. The Soviet President said: “She’s made in the bourgeois style, but I like her.” Splendid to have Nikita Khrushchev providing a neat definition of desire.

Stephen Bayley is a design critic and author, and first director of the Design Museum in London

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