A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

I A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

Come in, come in, please! Don’t worry, this is only a museum of Communism, not the real thing!

I am joking. But do come in, please. You are Hans, from Würzburg, I presume? I was expecting you. I am Bohumil, your distant relative. I live in this Prague museum in a school cabinet, among the old textbooks. It suits me. I am a bookish type, a book mouse, one could say, ha-ha! Some time ago my grammar school became a private university and the classrooms were refurbished. My cabinet was thrown out. I thought that would be the end of my comfortable life. But luckily, some people from the museum came along and brought the cabinet here, as an exhibit from the old times.

I share my days with Milena, an elderly cleaning woman who also sells souvenirs in the museum shop. She pretends that she doesn’t know that I live here. But why then, I ask you, did she try to kill me with her broom the very first time she saw me, an ordinary little mouse? Well, not kill perhaps, but scare me off. As I had no other place to go, she reconciled herself to my existence. Perhaps she thought that, after all, I am an underdog just like her? Now she leaves crumbs of bread and pieces of apple and cheese near my cabinet every evening before she leaves. Often, when we are alone, she is talking to me. She calls me Bohumil! She says, “You know, Bohumil, what happened to me today?”—and then goes on with her story. I usually stand on the windowsill and listen to her, keep her company. It took me some time to understand that since there is nobody around, Bohumil is—well, me!

She went out to smoke a cigarette now; she won’t be back for a while. The only thing I hold against Milena is that she’s a heavy smoker, even though it’s bad for her health. And for mine, too. In fact, I discovered that I have an allergy to cigarettes. Although she often opens a window to the courtyard to let out the smelly air. It’s an old habit from when she used to work in the state archive as a secretary. Not as a cleaner, mind you. Milena studied English and French. Speaking of air, she says that any institution that has anything to do with the Communist state, even this one, smells of dust. Perhaps from too many papers, documents about God knows what and God knows whom… Milena used to worry, you know, if her husband was registered in the files of the secret police. Of course he was registered! Like, he was a “security risk”! “Any state that has to depend on police reports about citizens like him, just an ordinary engineer in an electrical plant, is pathetic!,” she used to say to her friend Dáša, a cleaning woman from the casino downstairs. But obviously, this is how it was; every citizen was considered to be a “security risk” back then. However, in the new democracy, because of so-called privatization, her Marek lost his job. That’s why she works here; they need the money.

I cannot say that I mind living in this museum, although it was really more interesting living in the grammar school. I learned a lot about Communism by listening to the lectures of a history teacher there. Perlík was his name. I heard that he was also a poet, a kind of dissident intellectual, and that he even spent some time in jail when he was young.

You don’t have such a museum in Würzburg, you say, and your knowledge of Communism is almost nonexistent. Well, since you are here in Prague as a tourist, I could show you around. I consider myself qualified to be a guide here, but the sad truth is that the museum would not employ a mouse. I can tell you that the more time I spend here, the more I realize how important this museum is. I remember Professor Perlík’s words that the time would soon come when kids would say: Communism, what’s that? A religion? A maker of cars perhaps? And from what I heard from him, this is simply not right, Communism shouldn’t be remembered just by the likes of the professor or Milena, who survived it. It should be remembered for its bad sides and good; there must have been something good one can say about it, although that’s not a popular view to hold these days, I gather. For example, people could get a solid education, they say. Or there’s the fact that the Communist USSR fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet Milena says that watching Hollywood movies one gets the impression that it was the Americans who won it all on their own!

No, life under Communism should not be forgotten, although that is exactly what I see happening. In this museum shop, by the way, you can buy a history book about the dark past for only five euros. It’s cheap. And it is only a hundred pages long, in large print. “The older I get, the more I appreciate it,” says Milena. You can read here, for example (I heard someone reading it with my own ears!), that the wife of President Klement Gottwald was rather fat, or that the wife of Antonín Novotný (the man who later became president himself) took the china and the bedsheets from the flat of Vladimír Clementis. Of course, only after he was executed in the purges of the fifties. You can also learn—as I did—that 257,964 people sentenced for political reasons were rehabilitated in 1990.

Some visitors don’t care at all about such facts; they just purchase posters, stamps, T-shirts, and USSR military caps, along with wax candles in the forms of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. These are the single most popular souvenirs sold in the shop, I can tell you, maybe because they are the cheapest. I admit that I can hardly imagine the excitement of a person watching Stalin slowly melt down into a puddle of wax, but there are buyers who enjoy such symbolic acts.

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.

Ah, but I am getting too pedagogical, I’m afraid! My dear Hans, you must tell me if I am treating you like a total ignorant, you must stop me if I am boring you! I guess my attitude comes from the fact that too many Americans pass the museum nowadays…

But you are telling me to go on? Okay then, where was I? Yes, I wanted to say that Communist regimes generally seemed to prefer numbers over stories. Numbers are abstract, they create a kind of “scientific” neutrality. Let me give you an example, used by Professor Perlík: In his history class I heard him tell his pupils that Hitler exterminated some six million Jews in Europe during the Second World War. They gave him a blank look and continued to chat, and to push and throw things at each other. The information didn’t even catch their attention—let alone their imaginations. But then, he took his class to Poland. They visited Auschwitz death camps. I remember them talking afterward about that visit, about how memorable that spring day had been for them. Of course, Professor Perlík had already told them before what had happened there, but still they were totally unprepared. Evidently, nothing can prepare you for such horror—and that is kind of good, he said. You grasp the horror better once you see, with your own eyes, heaps of human hair, shoes, glasses… heaps of them. All that, every item, belonged to an individual with a name, to a real live person. He also told them that during Communism, he could not have told his pupils that some thirty million people died in the labor camps in Siberia. It was taboo. But I suspect that the professor told them just that, landing himself in prison.

Now, let’s go back to what you actually see here—what you see here is only a pile of dusty things, like in an old antique shop or a flea market somewhere in Kosice (though I’ve never been there, I heard someone making this comparison). Therefore, it seems that it is more important to see the invisible yet omnipresent ugliness of the Communist mentality, of which the artifacts in this museum are just a reflection. By mentality, I mean a certain way of thinking and behaving that developed over decades under harsh conditions. Not solidarity, as you might expect of people living under duress, but its opposite, selfishness, a slow hardening of the soul (this formulation, you rightly guess, comes from the more poetic side of our professor). Yet, only art, especially literature, can show you that. Novels like those of a certain Milan Kundera, a writer whose name I have often heard mentioned in this museum of late.

Our visitors usually want to take photos in this particular room. For example, if they stand here, where I am standing, they can take a photo of this beautiful nineteenth-century crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Indeed, they can get it in the same frame as the hammer and sickle—a really nice souvenir! By the way, this chandelier is widely considered by our visitors to be the only beautiful item in here. Although not intended as an exhibit, you could still say—as I have heard here—that it symbolizes the life of the bourgeoisie, the class enemy. As does this whole spacious apartment. “Look, a beautiful bourgeois apartment full of ugly things produced during Communism!” someone exclaimed recently.

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 “paneláky” 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.

Now we come to an interrogation room. Everybody says that this is the centerpiece of this museum. Indeed, here you can see what I mean when I keep saying that in this museum much is left to the individual imagination. Again, there is not much for you to actually see in this room: a desk, two chairs—one in front, one behind the desk—a lamp, an old typewriter, a hanger with the notorious black leather coat. Why notorious? Because they say that agents of the Soviet secret police would come for you in the middle of the night habitually wearing such a coat. Yet, what can these things, this setting, tell visitors like you, if you don’t know what happened in such interrogation rooms? Not much. You can see the statistics on the wall—names and numbers, again. They hide horrible stories, but as in the case of Auschwitz, these are abstractions. How can one present the people, the living persons behind the numbers? You have to make an effort to see the individual destiny, a man who has been interrogated and whose spirit is broken. Professor Perlík mentioned Arthur Koestler’s book Darkness at Noon and Arthur London’s The Confession—if I remember correctly. I know that the professor had a neighbor who testified at the trial of Rudolf Slansky during the first wave of Stalinist purges in the fifties here. He survived the whole ordeal. “But that man,” said the professor nodding sadly, “was never the same again.”

If anything, this room is the symbol of absolute power. In such rooms they would force people to betray not only others but themselves as well. On the other hand, this was the destiny of relatively few people. But think of something else not represented here. Think of how people lived—hundreds of millions of them—with a feeling that an interrogation room had been installed in their brains. You could not see it, but it was there. Now again you might think that I am exaggerating. But I’m merely speaking of self-censorship. It is a situation in which you yourself become your own interrogator—on exactly the opposite side of freedom of expression. What, you wonder if this was a form of political correctness? My dear Hans… let me put it this way, if I might quote the professor again: “Political correctness grew out of a concern for others; self-censorship grew out of a fear of others.” Surveillance of each other was installed as a system—perfected in the USSR but practiced everywhere. For example, you had no way of knowing if your elderly neighbor, who would even cook you a soup when you were ill, was in fact reporting on your every word and move. If you could not trust the people around you, in your house or at work, you would behave cautiously, controlling yourself. The system of surveillance and self-control lives off of fear and suspicion. It is a simple and efficient psychological mechanism that turns people into liars—and, therefore, into accomplices of the regime.

But, again, there were shades of gray even within this self-censorship. Antonín Novotný was not exactly Stalin, even if there are those who would like to see him like that nowadays. He used to blow his top over films like Closely Watched Trains by Jirí Menzel, which was awarded an Oscar in 1967, and The Firemen’s Ball, By Milos Forman. Or over novels by Ludvik Vaculik, Pavel Kohout, and Milan Kundera, all critical of Communism. In the midsixties the atmosphere in this country became so liberal that Secretary General Alexander Dubček believed it was even possible to reform Communism when he became secretary general in 1967. The invasion by the Warsaw Pact military force in 1968 started because of the Soviet fear of our reforms—of losing its grip on us, that is.

I recently overheard Milena telling some visitors the following story:

“That summer I saw Soviet tanks rolling into the streets of Prague. I will never forget that day. I was barely twenty years old, and I had gone out with my brother. We were running some errands downtown, and at one moment he asked me to buy him an ice cream. It was August twenty-first, a pleasant, sunny morning. We were somewhere near the National Theatre, and there, at the corner, was an ice cream stand. And just as we were turning to get there we heard a strange noise. It sounded like a thunderstorm at first, then like some huge, powerful machine moving. Indeed, I felt the asphalt tremble under my feet. As we were about to cross the road, we saw a tank at the bottom of the street, some hundred meters away. A tank in the middle of Prague! I had never seen a real one before, only in war movies. It was slowly coming toward us, very slowly, as if the soldiers were in no particular hurry. I remember we both just stood there, looking, as if hypnotized…

“Here, you see this photo? It was taken on the morning of August 21, 1968, by the Hajný brothers, Jan and Bohumil. Their photos became famous later. You see that woman with the small boy? Well, that happens to be me. Do you notice something odd about this photo? See how the people are behaving; see the woman with the white handbag. She must have heard the tank; she must have seen it coming. Yet she is walking down the street as if taking a stroll, probably deliberately so. Nobody seems to be panicking in this picture, and that, considering that the tanks are rolling closer and closer, is very strange behavior, no? You would think that people would be screaming and running away, scared. But no, the citizens of Prague are slowly walking, minding their own business, while the occupation army is entering their city! Oh, I just love this photo! No, not because I am in it, but because it captures a certain attitude of the people: pride, arrogance, even, in the face of might—like a kind of highly civilized act of protest. A kind of heroism the Czech way, as if we were saying, we are superior to your tanks. That is how we were, proud, brave. Those tanks did not humiliate us. We felt undefeated—at least for a short while! The best of Czechoslovakia is here in these photos. When you think that it was not about a revolution, not a demand to abolish Communism, but only to reform it into ‘socialism with a human face.ʹ… That day we listened to radio reports about what was happening, about clashes with the tanks in Vinohradska Street. The people of Prague were fighting the Warsaw Pact’s 750,000 troops and 6,000 tanks with Molotov cocktails and barricades! We had no chance. Dubček was kidnapped by the KGB and forced to sign the Moscow Protocol that legalized the Soviet occupation. I still remember that feeling of powerlessness and defeat that settled in and stayed with us for the next twenty years.”

“At least people now know that 1968 in Czechoslovakia was the beginning of the end,” the professor used to say. “They learned the hard way that Communism is not to be reformed. But never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that another attempt to reform Communism—a copy of 1968!— would come from within the USSR itself, and that it would mean its demise. Did you know that Gorbachev was friends with Zdeněk Mlynář, one of the leading figures of the Prague spring? Ah, Gorby, hated and forgotten in his own country… I remember how the whole Western world applauded him, as if he really wanted to dispatch Communism to the ‘graveyard of history,’ as it were. His achievement was that he did not, could not, send the army against us again (or against other Communist countries, for that matter). And this made it possible for our revolution to be velvet. Not so velvet as one might think, though: My own son, a student then, got hit in the head by the police during the November seventeenth student protest. My daughter soon became a member of Obcanske forum and knew Vaclav Havel personally. To me it’s as if it all happened yesterday… Yet, it was twenty years ago when I was standing under the balcony at Vaclavske namesti, where Havel was speaking, and chanting: ‘Havel to the castle!’ We wanted him to become president, and imagine—he did! He did! But once the dream was fulfilled, reality sank in.”

Here in the museum we have a cinema where you could, if you had the time, see documentary films about the revolution. The velvet revolution is a well-documented event; even you, Hans, have heard of it. This perhaps is the reason why not that many visitors sit here and watch—they have already seen it somewhere. And here, in this cinema, is the end of the story about Communism. In the museum, I mean.

“What did the change bring me?” Milena says. “I’ve lost my job. I have less money. My husband drinks. Freedom? What freedom? We can’t travel anywhere, we can’t buy things. We don’t even have a car now, can’t afford to keep it,” she laments to Dáša, who can only share her feeling. I sometimes feel sorry for both of them; they are obviously among the losers. These two ladies are perhaps not the best advertisement for democracy and capitalism, I’d say. The change happened too late for them. Indeed, what a frustration it must be to finally live in an age of plenty but not to be able to enjoy it, don’t you think, Hans?

It seems to me, judging from the little knowledge I acquired as a mouse in the Museum of Communism, that this frustration might be the reason why there is still something mean and suspicious, something hypocritical in people. Vestiges of former times, I suppose. As if people haven’t changed that much, not in their minds. I will give you an example: Earlier I mentioned Milan Kundera. He is allegedly the most famous Czech writer; you might even have seen a film made in Hollywood adapted from his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being? You know him? Well then, you also know that all his early novels deal with Communist repression in his country, like The Joke. In that book, Ludvik ends up in a labor camp, in a mine, just because he wrote a postcard to a former girlfriend: “Optimism is the opium of the masses! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” He meant it as a joke, but the police judged it as political text. Kundera left Czechoslovakia and went to France after the invasion in 1968 and never returned. After that he became one of the best-known dissidents from the Communist world, next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Suddenly, this same Kundera is in the middle of a scandal! I heard about it from a couple discussing it very loudly in this room just recently. In fact, they woke me up in the middle of my regular afternoon nap. What happened? In October 2008 a certain historian found a document that is taken as proof that Kundera is not what he seems to be. Not a moral man, but a denouncer no less. A document from 1950 is there to prove it. It is a police report, a short one. It states that Milan Kundera, at that time a student at the FAMU film academy and an ardent member of the CP, reported to the undersigned police inspector that there was a suspicious person staying in his dormitory. Following this, the police arrested Miroslav Dvoraček, a pilot and a spy for the American-supported Czech intelligence agency of that time. Dvoraček had illegally crossed the border back into Czechoslovakia and was on his way out again. Following Kundera’s report, the man was arrested and sentenced to twenty-two years of hard labor. Dvoraček served his sentence mostly in uranium mines. Yet, in his writing and interviews, Kundera never mentioned this episode.

“Now, again, we are seeing the resurrection of the same old pattern of suspicion that nobody is what he claims to be,” I heard the woman say angrily, as if she personally had suffered the consequence of his betrayal. “A dissident is not a dissident but a fugitive from his not very honorable past; a moral person is in fact immoral. Falsehood is truth, and so on. Until yesterday you would have believed that Kundera was a symbol of morality.”

“Well,” the man said, rather calmly, “every normal person should ask himself, But is that report real and not a setup? How come the document was discovered only now and by what ‘coincidenceʹ? No one believes in coincidences; there were too many of them in the past. Moreover, what’s the purpose of this ‘discovery’ and of publishing it? In short—who benefits from it today? I tend to just dismiss such coincidences; we should know better. No, the problem lies elsewhere: You see, true or not, the real problem is that this whole devilish story is believable. Convincing. Everybody agrees that it could have happened. It could have been that Kundera saw reporting on Dvoraček as his patriotic duty: He was a party member, he himself was in danger of going to prison if he didn’t report it, such were the times. It could have happened to anyone—or so the argument goes.”

“But this is the false argument!” the woman interrupted him. “Kundera is in no way ‘one of us,’ Kundera is—well, Kundera. What about his confession, then? People say, Why doesn’t he confess now, when his big secret is out? He should get it off his chest. Nonsense! They say such nonsense, in my opinion, because if such a great writer and dissident had made such a terrible denunciation then our own denunciations and compromises would look comparatively much pettier. So what if Svoboda spied on Markus and he was transferred to a worse job? At least he did not wind up in prison.”

“I agree,” the man said. Now his voice sounded sad. “There is a certain malevolent triumph in the ‘fact’ (or the fact, depending on how you look at it) that the best of us all could have failed. Even if it is not true but only a suspicion, only a possibility—it excites people. It makes heroes more human, petty like the rest of us. If he would only confess, they would immediately grant him forgiveness!”

“Ah, yes, forgiveness! My foot! They couldn’t wait to take away his moral credibility—since they couldn’t take away his talent and his fame,” the woman added, even more worked up now. “But he is a stubborn old man. And he also must know that his confession would only make it easier for such people, but not for himself. In a way, all these questions are unimportant and belated, because the seed of suspicion has been planted. If he is not guilty, however hard he tries, Kundera won’t be able to wash himself clean of it. If he is guilty it is sad, but it doesn’t annihilate his writing. If this is some consolation to him . .. ,” she concluded.

Why am I telling you about this particular case? Because—the way I understand Communism—it still belongs to the museum. Twenty years after its collapse, it illustrates the state of people’s minds here.

My dear Hans, I can hear Milena coming, she will be back any moment now… unfortunately that means you have to go. It was nice of you to visit me. I told you, she is not scared of me, even if she is a woman, and we know how hysterical they can get when they see a mouse. But I am not sure how she would react to you; you rats are much bigger than mice. You could scare her. I have to protect her from shock, because she has a weak heart. I also have to protect myself, because who knows who would come here if she were to go? I am sure you understand what I mean.

I hope that you found the museum interesting. I am afraid that you probably find me not competent enough as a guide. But I couldn’t tell how much you know about Communism and I wanted you to get a grasp of it. Remember, I am only an amateur guide! Anyway, Professor Perlík would say that what is important is what you do not see: fear, complicity, and the hypocrisy of life under Communism. However modest and superficial the museum might look to you, the importance of it is that it exists. That, in itself, is a miracle! Because, tell me, who would have ever thought, twenty years ago, that Communism would end up like this, in a museum? Or, for that matter, that you would visit me here, and that I would be your guide?

So long, and have a nice holiday in Paris!