A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (3 page)

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.”