As you come in, you inevitably notice busts and statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. A young man, a Czech, was here recently. Looking at Marx, he said: “Is that some Orthodox priest?” You could say that Marx, with his beard, did indeed look like one. You could also say that he was rather orthodox in his views and, in some ways, even like a priest, preaching his doctrine. But even I was astonished by the young man’s ignorance. What would Professor Perlík have made of his question? He would wonder what they teach them in history class nowadays, and would probably tell the boy, Well, read about him, you durak! That means stupid in Russian, but they don’t teach them Russian anymore. It is sad, although understandable. From my limited perspective as a mouse, a language is a language. It is worth learning regardless of the historical circumstances, no? But what can such an ignorant person read here in the museum about a historical figure like Karl Marx and the origins of Communism? See, here it says that he was “a bohemian and an intellectual adventurer, who started his career as a romantic poet with an inclination toward apocalyptic titanism, a sharp-tongued journalist”—as if that would somehow disqualify him from writing Das Kapital! Or look at this text about Lenin: “From the very beginning, Lenin pushed for the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness which became characteristic of all Communist regimes of the time.” What can I tell you? I know from Professor Perlík’s lectures that in Communist times, Lenin was glorified much too much, and that textbooks were even more seasoned with such descriptions and with the same kind of cheap psychology as this one! But the professor would probably say that there is no need for ideology nowadays and that we need history instead.
You know, sometimes when they come to this room with paintings from the Soviet school of socialist realism, with busts and a spaceship and a school class and a workshop—all in one room!—I can see how disappointed visitors are. I peek out at them from my cabinet, and our visitors look to me like those people who love to visit freak shows with a two-headed goat or a bearded woman—that kind of thing. Of course, I see why they are disappointed—there is no Stalin in a cage, not even a mummy of Lenin! They see only a heap of old things here, more like a junkyard, which in fact it is. Exhibits here are from flea markets and all kinds of garage sales, even straight out of rubbish bins. See, here Communism is finally reduced to the rubbish heap of history! Isn’t that what the velvet revolution in 1989 was all about? That is what I would like to tell them when they make faces, like, Is that all you have here? What more would they want to see?
Permit me to say that, from what I have heard from the professor, Communism is not so much about exhibits, about seeing. It is more about how one lived in those times, or more to the point, how one survived them. From the lack of food or shoes to the lack of freedom and human rights. The question is, How do you present that kind of shortage, shortages that were not just poverty-induced, to somebody who knows very little about it? Because people who experienced life under Communism tend not to come here, anyway. I am afraid that our Innocent Visitor, as I call such people, has to use his imagination. Therefore, I sometimes think that Milena is the best “exhibit” they could see here, because she lived most of her life under Communism. If only visitors would ask her about her life… but nobody does.
Let me first tell you about the museum itself, advertised as “above McDonald’s, next to the Casino.” Indeed, it is very properly situated in Na Přikope, “in the heart of consumer capitalism ,” as one visitor remarked the other day. It was opened in December of 2001 in the nineteenth-century Palác Savarin. It stores roughly one thousand artifacts in four rooms and was founded privately by an American of Czech origin. Why was it privately funded? Excellent question, Hans, and very logical too! Because, astonishingly enough, nobody from the democratic government hit upon this idea. Strange, you may think, that such an important era of the recent past would not have been documented had it not been for a couple of enthusiasts. You think the reason might be that it deals with too painful a time, that memories are still too vivid? Well, I wonder about that. If you ask Milena, there is another reason why the Czechs (or Slovaks, for that matter; this is their museum, too!) don’t care about such a museum and don’t visit it either. “They want to run as far away from Communism as they can. Our young people don’t care, for them Communism is the ancient past. Those old enough to remember it want to forget it now. And why? Because they went along with it. As I did. As my husband did, and our neighbors, and everybody we knew, every Pavel and Elena around us,” I heard her say.
I remember that I once heard Professor Perlík say that today everybody claims they were not members of the Communist Party, that they did not really belong. “If you believed what people here say, you would think that not a single person in this whole country was ever a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia! They all were victims! That is rather stupid, especially given the fact that 10 percent of the population were party members, plain and simple. That means one million seven hundred thousand people! I understand that not all of them were believers; they were only formally members because of the job and career and benefits that went with membership. But no regime, however totalitarian, could exist without complicity on the part of the people—however unwilling it might be,” I remember Professor Perlík saying. “Let us not kid ourselves; most of us complied in order not only to survive—because Czechoslovakia was not the USSR—but just to live better. I admit it’s a hard fact to face now. But yes, there is a difference between those who were members only formally and those who really collaborated. Perhaps it sounds to you as if there is no big difference between the two? Collaboration is a more active attitude, a kind of partnership. For example, while most ordinary members of the party merely complied, some collaborated with the regime. “There are many shades of gray,” he used to say. And then he quoted Vaclav Havel, the hero of the “velvet revolution,” who himself said that the line between victim and oppressor runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.
I realized that it is not without reason that the history of the CPCz, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is written on a single long scroll of paper, glued to the wall, almost as if intended not to be seen. I guess what I am trying to explain to you here is that I learned how the most important things about Communism are the invisible ones. And that in this museum you won’t see the shades of gray that prevailed in everyday life. That is why such a museum reaches only so deep—this criticism comes from a very learned man who was here, maybe a curator in another museum, or some kind of critic. According to him, the museum does not—and cannot—show you the full depth of what people lived through. “There is no personal history given here, no individual destiny,” the man said. On the other hand, perhaps no museum of Communism is capable of doing that. And you know what I think? Not that the opinion of someone like me counts at all, but nevertheless I’ll tell you that maybe this museum got it right! Maybe the absence of individual stories is the best illustration of the fact that individualism was the biggest sin one could commit.