BY JOHN H. FUND
Wednesday, February 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Communism cast a shadow over much of the world for three-quarters of a century until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. But only recently have serious attempts been made to come to grips with its bloody legacy in the form of new museums and memorials.
This year ground will be broken for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington (www.victimsofcommunism.org). The site on Capitol Hill was donated through a bill signed by President Clinton, and 75% of the necessary private funds have been raised for a 10-foot bronze replica of the "Goddess of Liberty" statue, which Chinese dissidents erected in Tiananmen Square before both it and their movement were crushed by tanks in 1989. The statue's inscriptions will both mourn the "more than 100 million victims of Communism" and call for the freedom of "all captive nations and peoples."
Nearby, the son of the late U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is planning a brick-and-mortar version of his online Cold War Museum (www.coldwar.org) at a former Nike missile site in Lorton, Va. Washington's impressive International Spy Museum (www.spymuseum.org) focuses on Cold War espionage. It features bizarre stories such as how Western diplomats stationed in Soviet bloc countries who ordered dress shoes from back home would have them intercepted on the way, with a bug fitted in a heel before delivery.
But the largest U.S. collection of Cold War artifacts and archives is housed in Los Angeles's new Wende Museum (www.wendemuseum.org). Founder Justinian Jampol became fascinated by life behind the Iron Curtain as a child, and now spends much of his time overseas gathering up its icons in the hope that scholars can learn how totalitarians manipulate culture to stay in power. Many of his 50,000 items, including personal papers of communist leaders and cars of the period, are in storage. But on display are logbooks of border guards that record the collapse of the Berlin Wall as it occurred, as well as toys designed to encourage fealty to the state.
As some museums are being built up, however, other symbols of the Cold War are coming down. Last month, the German Parliament voted to demolish the largest remaining relic of the vanished East German state. The Palace of the Republic, a gutted eyesore with bronze-mirrored windows on Berlin's Unter den Linden, will be replaced by a replica of the baroque palace that stood on the site until the communists blew it up in 1950. The East German hulk, which covers an area equivalent to 24 soccer fields, housed the dictatorship's rubber-stamp parliament as well as a concert hall where Harry Belafonte played in the 1980s. Despite its origin, thousands of demonstrators demanded it be preserved.
After their Palace is gone, perhaps the protesters would do well to visit places that still capture the true spirit of East Germany. In May, a new DDR Museum (ddr-museum.de/en) will open in Berlin, dedicated to showing ordinary life behind the Wall. Just as the Sachsenhausen camp reminds Berlin visitors of the Nazi horrors, two chilling museums illustrate communism's drive to crush "hostile negative elements."
The most haunting is the Hohenschönhausen interrogation center (www.stiftung-hsh.de), where "guests" were tortured in a row of subterranean cells dubbed "the U-boat." They included water-torture cells and some so small one could only stand in them. In later years, the jailers perfected psychological torture that stripped prisoners of all their defenses. Today's guides to the center were all former political prisoners there.
A 15-minute drive away is the headquarters of the Stasi, the feared secret police agency that was given an unlimited budget by a paranoid Politburo (www.stasi-museum.de). While Hitler's Gestapo policed 80 million Germans with 40,000 employees, the Stasi kept 17 million people in line with some 100,000 intelligence officers. In addition, it employed 1.5 million informers, which meant every seventh adult was submitting reports on friends, colleagues and even spouses. Ironically, toward the end the Stasi had too few Western computers to process them and drowned in its own absurdist accumulation of data.
Today, one can visit the office where the late Stasi chief Erich Mielke worked until the collapse of the Berlin Wall--or, as he called it, "the anti-fascist protective barrier." An "ultra top secret" phone sits on his desk, while a paper-shredder and a TV tuned to Western channels perch nearby. In adjoining rooms, displays include schoolchildren's essays examined for disloyalty, a bugged watering can that was placed in gardens, and jars used to preserve cloth impregnated with the personal scent of dissidents so dogs could hunt them down.
Berlin isn't the only place where one can look for the ghosts of Marx's heirs. Prague has a small communism museum; old KGB prisons in the Baltic States are open to the public. But Budapest has done the best at making the alternately drab and chilling reality of communism come alive. Absolute Tours (www.absolutetours.com) runs an excellent "Hammer and Sickle" walk that includes an excursion to Statue Park--a sort of cemetery for extinct Marxist dinosaurs.
Downtown Budapest has the House of Terror (www.terrorhaza.hu), a new museum that is the equal of Washington's Holocaust Museum in showing how dictatorships destroy civil society. Even the awning projects menace. It has the word "Terror" cut out of it, and in sunlight the word is projected onto the sidewalk below. From 1944-45 the building was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis, and hundreds of Jews and other enemies were executed in the basement.
After the city fell to the Soviets, the communist secret police moved in, finding the building also suited their methods. In "The Changing Room," a rotating mannequin wearing a fascist uniform on the front and a communist one on the back vividly illustrates the ease with which some Hungarians switched sides to serve new masters. A stirring exhibit shows how the Catholic Church refused to surrender its soul to the apparatchiks. A three-minute video has a guard explain execution methods as you descend in a slow-moving elevator to the basement torture chambers.
The last two rooms in the House of Terror are nicknamed "Sweet" and "Sour." The first shows exhilarating videos of Soviet troops leaving Hungary. The second is a photo wall of "victimizers," local supporters of the Nazis or communists who escaped justice. Some of them are still living, but even those who aren't have children for whom the House of Terror is a sensitive subject.
When in 2002 the new socialist government threatened to slash the new museum's funding, Maria Schmidt, its director, suggested she would suspend from the building's awning giant blowups of the communist parents of current government ministers. The government swiftly backed down, no doubt prodded by an admission that year from Socialist Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy that he had been an officer for the communist secret service. He resigned, as did a leading opposition leader whose father had been an informer.
Not surprisingly, Russia has resisted efforts to create museums about the communist era for the general public. For $700 one can tour Joseph Stalin's World War II bunker. Moscow's KGB Museum at the infamous Lubyanka Prison is open for $500 private group tours. But if you want to get close to KGB history for free, you might visit the hilltop villa at 4 Angelikastrasse in Dresden, Germany. Inside, an ambitious KGB agent named Vladimir Putin worked from 1985 to 1990 trying to forestall the collapse of communism.
Mr. Putin, now the autocratic president of Russia, told his people last April that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Perhaps that explains why as other nations erect memorials to the victims of communism, Russia deals with the subject in frosty silence.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
