I kind of like the fact that this is a museum of ugly things. By the time visitors like you arrive here, they have had their fill of the beautiful buildings in the neighborhood, so they don’t notice beauty any longer. Golden altars, baroque facades, angels, Madonnas, spectacular church paintings. Indeed, I have seen such things myself during my excursions into the neighborhood. Here, in this museum, like in real Communism, ugliness reigns. Sometimes I hear foreigners wonder aloud: “Why doesn’t Communism care about beauty?” You only need to go to the southern outskirts of Prague to see whole blocks of ghastly gray housing developments, called ʺpaneláky” because they were built out of prefabricated material in the seventies. By the way, that material is great for us mice; it is so easy to make a nice home there! Yet, these buildings provided a home for millions of people (and mice) — for the so-called proletariat! — who moved from their villages to the city to work in industry. Milena and her Marek still live in such a building, in a two-room 63-square-meter apartment. They were happy when they got it in the sixties, after years of waiting in a single rented room heated by a coal-burning stove instead of an electric one or a central heating system.
Almost anything that was produced under Communism anywhere — from apartment buildings to clothes, from furniture to pots and pans — is considered to be ugly. Although this was not the case in this very country, the Communist system originally was built by and for poor peasants. Where would they get a sense of beauty? Functionality, not looks, was the priority in every aspect, the arts included; hence socialist realism, of course. Any divergence from that rule, say, abstract painting, was simply punished and forbidden — in the USSR after the thirties, for example. Art in general — painting, for instance — had a political-ideological-educational role, much as did medieval frescoes that explained the beginning of the world (and religion) to the masses. Ugliness was built into that system, I learned from Jana Strugalová, who taught art in our grammar school and was herself very beautiful. Some examples you see exhibited here, like the furniture in this “typical living room” (Soviet) where we are standing now. “Style of living,” it says. As if poverty were a “style”! Style is something one chooses; even a mouse can understand that.
Now, if you take a look at the representation of a typical school classroom to your right, what do you see? A blackboard, a few benches, and a cabinet — that’s where I live, by the way. It doesn’t tell you much, except for, perhaps, one detail. Have you noticed that the textbooks and the writing on the blackboard are in the Cyrillic alphabet? No? The Czech alphabet uses the Latin script. This exhibit obviously symbolizes a Soviet classroom. You must have noticed that the majority of objects exhibited so far have to do with the Soviet Union, not Czechoslovakia, as the country was called before the split in 1993. If you pay attention to the details, it is easy to conclude that the USSR is overrepresented in this museum, as one visitor observed. We are in Prague, after all, but all visitors get (as you yourself can witness) is a kind of written chronology of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in that corridor that you passed. This clearly suggests that Czechs see themselves as the victims of Communism, not as the “original sinners,” so to speak. Later you will see, when we come to 1968, that the rebellion against the Soviet occupation is much better documented. The rebellion is important, something to be proud of, therefore there are a lot of photos and even documentary films. As if the creators of this museum (but we are not supposed to bite the hand that feeds us, as Milena would say!) were a bit ashamed of Czech history, of the fact that, say, in the elections of 1946 some 40 percent of the people voted for the Communists. You’ll agree that the Czechs can’t blame the USSR for that!
Milena says that her family, like millions of others, was responsible for accepting the new political system. Theirs is by no means an exceptional story; nobody was jailed, murdered, or tortured. Her parents came here after the war from some Bohemian village and got a job in a furniture factory, happy to put their hard life on the land behind them. She and her brother (I saw him when he visited Milena here) went to a grammar school. Their parents insisted that they study because that was the only way to a better life, they believed. They were right. The brother became a doctor. Milena began studying foreign languages soon after she’d met her husband. He was a student of electrical engineering. When the baby came, someone had to work, and that someone was Milena. They both tried to stay out of politics, accepting party membership because it was the obvious way to get an apartment, a car, a vacation in Bulgaria. In hindsight, she admits, they were passive, meek, and submissive. A bit like us mice, you know. It was the only way if you were not prepared to go to jail, and we would like to forget that now.
Let’s stop at this exhibit of a typical shop in the USSR. Shops here looked much better, so I was made to understand. In comparison to Moscow, Prague shops were like elegant supermarkets: full of food, especially after 1968, in the period of so-called normalization. Here you could see two kinds of canned food. That’s perhaps an exaggeration; there must have been a few more items in the shops in the USSR, at least in the big cities. Still, you have to imagine what it was like to live on very meager means. Ordinary poverty, you think? I’ve heard others say that too, meaning that there was poverty in the West also, especially after the war. Well, you could call it poverty, I suppose, but it is really not the same. “Poverty is when there are things to buy but you don’t have the money for them. A shortage is something else: it is when you have the money but there is nothing to buy — the articles are either not produced or not delivered to the shops — because of the way the planned economy works.” Again, this is how Professor Perlík explained it to his pupils. “I mean, you had to be very skillful to get certain products, like shoes, for example. It worked almost like the natural exchange of goods, or if not goods, then services: If you provide me with the medicine I need, I can help you get a better coat, and so forth,” he explained.
Also, shortages seem to be the key to understanding the end of Communism. You think it was Pope John Paul II? Or Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost and perestroika? Or both of them combined? Yes, of course, everybody agrees on that. But take a look at this shop again. Toilet paper is not exhibited here, and for good reason: There wasn’t any. Nor were there sanitary napkins, or diapers, or washing powder — not to mention coffee, butter, or oranges. Milena remembers when a friend would travel abroad — Yugoslavia was abroad then, because it was outside of the Soviet bloc — and there in the midseventies you could get toilet paper — her friend would fill a suitcase with rolls and rolls of it! Banalities, you might say — but they, too, decided the destiny of the Communist regimes everywhere. In order to understand why Communism failed, one has to know that it could not produce the basic things people needed. Or, perhaps, not enough of them. How long could such regimes last? The success of a political system is also measured in terms of the goods available to ordinary people, I suppose. And to mice, I might add. Sometimes, when I am making my bed from the fine, soft Italian toilet paper that Milena puts in our toilets, I wonder if my life would have been different if I had been born under Communism. Yet, there is communism and Communism, of course. My cousins in Romania, for example, had to chew on their tails sometimes just to keep hunger at bay. That was never the case here. In Czechoslovakia during Communism, the authorities merely needed to keep the price of beer low; otherwise they would have had a real revolution on their hands! Most probably that was the main reason why beer was always so cheap here.