It's not easy to find the Prague Museum of Communism. Even though it's located right in the middle of the city center, it still seems strangely hidden. As a matter of fact, it is housed in a casino, or, more precisely, as a kind of subletter in the same building – the Palais Savarin – in which the casino is also located. As if to help potential visitors find the museum, the organizers provide additional coordinates on an advertising postcard, printed on the back of a picture of Lenin: »We’re above McDonalds, across from Benetton«. And to make sure to nip any chance of ideological misunderstanding in the bud – »Viva La Imperialism!«
It sounds like a joke and it is in fact a joke. The Prague Museum of Communism is not the kind of cultural institution that should be taken seriously. It is much more of a puppet show version from the viewpoint of post-communism, which is just what makes it so interesting. Although it's true that one learns almost nothing about the communist past there, one discovers that much more about the post-communist impossibility of dealing with this past.
Naturally, the museum's authors claim just the opposite. In a flyer prepared for interested journalists one reads that the museum is an »authoritative historical narrative« about the phenomenon of communism. And, as a matter of fact, in the 450 square meters of exhibition space the visitor is indeed confronted with an authoritative history. But this is not the history of communism itself; instead, it is the history of a people that had the historical bad luck of being invaded by communist totalitarianism and held in its sway for a time. This is a story with a happy end, though - the final triumph of capitalism - and it is from the perspective of this fortunate outcome that the story is told.
The museum is set up in the form of a circular route with three main stations: the Dream, the Reality and the Nightmare. The historical drama of communism ostensibly took place in these three acts. At first people believed in the Marxist-Leninist utopia, they were then disappointed by socialist reality, and this ultimately ended in a totalitarian nightmare. A motley assortment of artifacts is meant to make this simple story come to life before our eyes: the Soviet and Czechoslovakian flags, busts of communist ideologues, photographs of the times, documentaries, and a number of everyday objects that are intended to make day-to-day life in socialist Czechoslovakia once again visible and tangible. The objects are grouped according to themes: industrial work, education, agriculture, Socialist Realist art, the organization of the People's Militia and the People's Army, the secret police and the practices of the apparatus of suppression, the urban destruction of Prague, the cultural opposition, the dissidents, etc. These themes actually represent summary stereotypes: the motto of the museum might be »We will show you exactly what you always knew about communism«.
For example: the fact that the communists invested all of their energy in the development of heavy industry, which ultimately produced only second-rate junk and caused an ecological disaster in the process. In order to help visitors to visualize this, one corner of the museum features a reproduction of a »socialist workshop«. Here, items such as old, used tools, a rusty bicycle and a broken motorbike, etc. have been amassed. The fact that these odds and ends, which are supposed to present for us the aggregate misery of the socialist method of production, are placed next to a MIG cockpit and a Yuri Gagarin poster, which at the same time – especially in the case of the world's first cosmonaut – are supposed to function as symbols of progress for all of mankind, does not seem to evoke a contradiction in the context of the museum. No wonder. The discursive space of post-communism in principle knows no contradictions. Thus, in the context of the museum, the »first man in space« is just one more proof that the communist utopia, even when realized, was nothing but a lie. It is expected of visitors that they already know the truth of the communist past before they come to the museum: that the Soviet Union did not promote space flight for the purpose of authentic exploration of nature, but rather for completely different motives, for example ideological (to distract people's attention from their everyday misery), or as propaganda (to prove the superiority of the communist over the capitalist system), or simply to expand communist power and control to the whole of humanity. But the entire Soviet space program was simply never as «genuine» as the American one, for instance.
The most important piece in the Prague Museum of Communism can be found outside the museum, on the street. This is a poster designed to motivate passersby to visit the museum: the image of a Russian matrioshka nesting doll, which is strangely disfigured. This matrioshka has teeth – the teeth of a shark. This image is the culmination of the museum's stance as a kind of conceptual essence of omnipresent anti-communism. This anti-communism is unfounded in today's realpolitik. Without its enemy, which has long since disappeared over the historical horizon, it cannot articulate itself in current political struggles. This makes it all the more important in the theater of post-communist subjectification. The image of a Russian shark-matrioshka marks a virtually ideal differentiation for the education of post-communist identities: the stereotype of the cultural other, comprehensible both as phobia and as fetish. Whereas communism was once a project for universal emancipation, today it's been reduced to a Russian woman threatening us with castration.
What is really going on in the Museum of Communism is a kind of cultural localization of communism. The entire history of communism, its traumatic historic presence, is posthumously fixed as an essentialist cultural identity. What was once the universal aspiration toward emancipation of the world proletariat, is today particularized, relativized and projected forward as cultural otherness. This makes it impossible to discover communism anymore in its own historical identity, since it was never there in the first place. It was a stranger from the East, from whence it once came to us uninvited and to where it was once again consigned.
What the Prague Museum of Communism presents for us is the birth of the post-communist subject out of the fetishistic stereotype. In its relationship to its own communist past, this subject shows the ambivalence typical for fetishism: a simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of its communist history. The fact that this denial has taken the form of a cultural localization is demonstrated most convincingly by the Prague Museum. Rather than demonstrating for us a culture of memory, it exhibits culture itself as the place of forgetting.
Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida