Brutalism was just another communist crime, razing old europe so they could stamp their manifestations of authoritarianism on it.
Brutalism was popular in France too, withmany extremely popular proponents (Le Corbusier to name one). Many big projects in the 50-60-70-80s were built in a brutalist style. Most have aged terribly though mostly IMHO due to poor maintennce.
When a classical building is run down people flock to visit it. Pantheon/Coliseum. Brutalist buildings we're ugly and depressing as built.
Every time a holier-than-thou architectural magazine waxes poetic about the beauty of "poor forgotten brutalism", they make their point by showing extremely well-cropped, always black and white, high contrast images to make the shadows pop. And then say wow isn't it a shame we're tearing these down? It's because that's not what crumbling Soviet-era buildings look like. Sure they're fun to photograph. I've seen these…
What the buildings look like in color National Theatre https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Pr... The Transgas building https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Pr... Koospol (The CUBE) https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-waymarking-images/315ed165-5a22-... DBK Department Store https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Pr...
Brutalism produced disasters and masterpieces like any other artistic trend. Let's do what we've been doing for thousands of years and keep the masterpieces and a few of the disasters to show the range of the style and move on. Badly designed, built, or photographed buildings exists regardless of their style. You don't have to go too far (in the US at least) to find examples of awful neoclassicism for instance.