Museums of Communism

New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe

Stephen M. Norris

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780253050304, 9780253050304
• eBook ISBN: 9780253052346
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.

Figure A.01. Halls of Terror, sites of violence. Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, Vilnius. Photograph by Stephen M. Norris

A

HALL OF GENOCIDE, OCCUPATION, AND TERROR

In his magisterial history of postwar Europe, the late Tony Judt concludes that “the politics of aggrieved memories—however much these differed in detail and even contradicted one another—constituted the last remaining bond between the former Soviet heartland and its imperial holdings.”¹ The hegemony of Soviet historical narratives, which stressed that the Red Army had liberated the countries of Eastern and Central Europe and which tended to ignore the murder of the Jewish population of Europe, ensured that many people who lived in these countries would nurse grudges about the past. Soviet occupation and the communist systems that Moscow helped to establish meant that Eastern and Central Europeans predominately viewed the historical views offered from the Kremlin as another form of occupation. When the communist systems collapsed across the region between 1989 and 1991, Judt writes, it “brought in its wake a torrent of bitter memories.”²

Such recollections formed the basis of new national histories and, with them, the foundational narratives of new museums dedicated to commemorating the past sufferings and losses under communism. The new museums that opened in the 1990s and 2000s attempted to explain how “ordinary” Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, and Poles (and others) had been doubly victimized, first under Nazism and then under Communism. These narratives of suffering focused on the dominant national groups of new nations and constituted a sort of unofficial competition over which group suffered the most. Although the impulse to commemorate the violence under communism is understandable, as we shall see in the chapters that make up this section, the new museums that set the aggrieved memories in stone have proven to be problematic.

The photograph at the start of this section is one I took in 2016 at the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, Lithuania (the museum changed its name in 2018 to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights after criticisms that the original name ignored the Nazi genocide). It is an image of death. It is a photograph of the basement floor in the building that once served as the headquarters of the Soviet security services. In its bowels, the very place where I snapped this photograph, members of that organization imprisoned, tortured, and executed political prisoners. What you see in this photograph are shoes discovered in post-1991 excavations now encased in glass, as well as another, blown-up photograph of skeletons from these political murders. Other objects that once belonged to the dead are also displayed in this room.

The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights is a site where the unburied are now buried and where the unremembered of the Communist Era are now remembered. It is a place where a new nation, or more properly, a renewed nation—Lithuania—is reconstituted around past trauma. The building that housed the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB; Committee for State Security) in Lithuania became the site around which alternative interpretations of Soviet “liberation” formed, a focal point for the “aggrieved memories” I have referred to. This was a place of occupation, of violence, of victimhood.

As we will see in this section, similar sites have proliferated across the region. The Budapest House of Terror’s basement contains rooms where executions took place. The records of rejected appeals for clemency are displayed on the walls. Loudspeakers read the names of “martyrs” and the staircases contain a photograph gallery of victimizers: the “yes-men and stooges” of the Fascist and Communist systems in Hungary.³ Lonsky Prison in L’viv, Ukraine, has cells where political executions took place. Its courtyard also witnessed horrifying violence now commemorated as a foundational struggle for the new Ukraine. The Karlag Museum in Kazakhstan contains torture cells complete with graphic reconstructions of the death that occurred in them. The Corner House in Riga, Latvia, also functioned as the Soviet security service’s headquarters in that city. Its displays are reminiscent of the other sites.

These places function as “memorial museums” in the way Paul Williams has identified: places that add a moral framework—in these cases national suffering under occupying regimes—to the narration of gruesome histories.⁴ Visitors are asked not just to read about atrocities but to feel something. The sites, explored here through locations in Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Latvia, are powerful ones. The organizers of the museums, often working with government officials and local scholars, carefully selected the objects, displays, and spaces and presented them to evoke emotions, to draw the visitor into the horrors once meted out inside the building. In doing so, they capture a particular postcommunist form of “thanatourism,” or “death tourism”; that is, sites built for visitors that are predicated on death and on trauma. They have overlapping functions: educational, mourning, healing, nation building, political, activist.⁵ Like other sites in this subgenre, the purpose of postcommunist memorial museums is to offer finality, to perform funeral rites, to remember the dead, but to do so in a fashion that evokes feeling—even outrage—and that contributes to the foundation of a new or revived nationhood.

The sites in this section’s chapters are the most common form of the new museum of communism. They use spaces once known for violence to build a national narrative of suffering around them. Many pay nominal attention to other occupations, but the main focus is the Soviet one. Thus, the recent past on display in these museums becomes an act of remembrance and an act of defiance, blaming the suffering that once occurred within on another country.

NOTES

1. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 825.

2. Ibid., 824.

3. See the museum‘s website: http://www.terrorhaza.hu/en/allando-kiallitas/basement/staircase-gallery-of-victimisers.

4. Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (New York: Berg, 2007), 8.

5. See Brigitte Sion, ed., Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape (London: Seagull, 2014), 3.

Figure 1.1. Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, Vilnius, founded 1992. http://genocid.lt/muziejus/en/. Photograph by Stephen M. Norris

ONE

Sovereign Pain

Liberation and Suffering in the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Lithuania

NERINGA KLUMBYTĖ

“Your suffering liberated us.”

—Algirdas Bakūnas¹

If not for golden summers,

The skies of rye flowers

We wouldn’t come here

Where days are gray.

Where is the dusty train

It takes us far away . . .

Oh dear mother, I recall

The meadows green.

The summers pass in a rush

The hopes like flowers bloom

The tears we quietly brush

At the grave of our youth.

If not for golden summers,

The skies of rye flowers

We wouldn’t come here

Where days are gray.²

The beautiful sounds of this song touch me deeply as I film the Day of Occupation and Genocide commemorating seventy-five years of Lithuania’s occupation taking place at Victim Street in front of the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius on June 15, 2015 (see fig. 1.1).³ On June 15, 1940, the Soviet Army moved into the territory of Lithuania, then a sovereign state. At the commemoration, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė reminded everyone about contemporary threats from Russia as well as the importance of memory: “It’s important that everyone who can testify, does testify, with memories, truth, and facts. We were occupied. Nobody can erase this word from our memory, from our understanding of history. It also means these facts oblige us to defend our state every day, not only from outside threats, but also from internal betrayal”⁴ (fig. 1.2). After a few other speeches by the government officials, poet and writer Vladas Kalvaitis, a former political prisoner and a deportee, stood up, interrupted the event, and pointed to the windows of the Museum of Genocide Victims. Kalvaitis was tortured there, in the former prison of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Speeches, songs, and flowers for those who died for Lithuania’s freedom followed and then the sounds of the song “If Not for Golden Summers.” It was so powerful, beautiful, and sorrowful. Some of the audience joined in singing. I heard an older lady sob behind my back. I turned around, she wiped her eyes. Was she imprisoned here, too?

Figure 1.2. President Dalia Grybauskaitė (in front of the flag) and the government delegation walking to the Museum of Genocide Victims square to commemorate the Day of Occupation and Genocide and the Day of Mourning and Hope. Photograph by Neringa Klumbytė, June 15, 2015

The museum building, in front of which the commemorations of Lithuania’s occupation take place every year, has a long history under different political regimes. In 1899 it was built as a courthouse of the Vilnius province of the Russian empire. In 1899, some passersby must have recalled the hanging of revolutionaries from the 1863 uprising in the square facing the building. As years passed, this building hosted government institutions of the Russian empire, the German empire, the Republic of Lithuania, the Bolshevik government, Poland, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, again the Soviet Union, and again Lithuania—at least nine different governments in a little more than a hundred years. In the Soviet period, the building housed the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the People’s Commissariat of State Security (NKGB), the Ministry for State Security (MGB), and the Committee of State Security (KGB). In post-1991 Lithuania, the building has again served as a courthouse; it also hosts the Research Center for Resistance and Genocide of Lithuania’s population, the KGB archives, a small chapel for “Lithuania’s genocide victims,” and the Museum of Genocide Victims. The Museum of Genocide Victims was renamed to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights on May 2, 2018.

The building and the space around it have now been dedicated as a memorial site. A plaque on the building recalls Soviet and Nazi eras of terror and oppression: “During the occupations of the 20th century, the following repressive bodies operated in this building: the Gestapo and the KGB. The genocide of the population was planned here. Citizens of Lithuania were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and killed.”⁵ The names of many victims who perished in the prison are engraved on the building’s walls. There is a plaque on the pavement for partisan Petras Vizbaras Vapsva, who died in 1953 after jumping out the third floor window to escape interrogation. During commemoration events, candles are lit at the building walls and at the monuments nearby (fig. 1.3). The museum webpage states that “For the Lithuanian nation this building is a symbol of the 50-year-long Soviet occupation, [and] therefore it is of special importance that here the museum is founded to remind the present generation and to tell the future generations about the years 1940–1991, difficult and tragic for Lithuania and its people.”⁶

The name and mission statements of the museum label Soviet terror genocide. Order No. 1230/236 of October 14, 1992, signed by the Lithuanian Culture and Education Ministry and the Union of Political Prisoners and Deportees, established the museum to commemorate the “victims of the Soviet Union genocide.”⁷ The museum’s aim is to “gather, research and propagate historical documentary material that reflects the physical and sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• From Communist Museums to Museums of Communism: An Introduction
• Exhibit A: Hall of Genocide, Occupation, and Terror
• Exhibit B: Hall of National Tragedies
• Exhibit C: Hall of Everyday Life
• Exhibit D: Hall of Russian Memory
• Exhibit E: Rotating Exhibits
• Index