Preview Memory in Ruins: The Impossible Museum of Communism

Elidor Mëhilli

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• Publié le: 09 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 32
• Langue: English

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         Memory in Ruins: The Impossible Museum of Communism     Elidor Mëhilli Department of History Princeton University     Abstract  Based on field research in Berlin, Budapest, Moscow, Prague, and Tirana, this paper investigates the ways in which the Communist era has been remembered and commemorated (or not) twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Each example is complicated by the distinct experiences under Communist rule and the ensuing transition, but even a preliminary comparative look brings out issues of interest. First and foremost, the post-Communist political landscape has shaped what commemoration, if any, has taken place. This has been mostly the domain of private enterprises or small- scale projects as opposed to official commemoration initiatives. Tension has also persisted between efforts that focus on the commemoration of victims or the legacy of repression and models that feed the “Communist experience industry” by exploiting the collective curiosity over the material world left behind by centrally planned economies. What clearly emerges, however, is the fact that the Communist world is widely remembered as a “lost civilization” and that efforts of remembrance in the former Soviet bloc, despite the evident pressures of national memory or the constraints and interests of local narratives, look vastly familiar from Berlin to Warsaw, and from Tirana to Moscow.

As the Berlin Wall was chopped into thousands of pieces in the early 1990s, sealed in plastic bags to be sold at local shops or shipped abroad, countless monuments across the

Communist world came under attack. In Albanias capital Tirana, an inflamed crowd toppled Enver Hoxhas statue on 20 February 1991. Hundreds of students had entered a hunger strike because the party leadership refused, among other things, to remove Hoxhas name from the state university. In support, protesters decapitated Hoxhas statue, physically humiliated the body, and dragged it across the city. A few months later

in Moscow, the Soviet collapse was memorably captured in the collective assault against the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the post-revolutionary Soviet secret police. At the time, Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis produced a documentary called

“Disgraced Monuments” that captured this feverish “age of ruins.” It drew parallels between the Bolshevik aversion to tsarist symbols during the tumultuous revolutions of 1 1917 and the 1991 assaults. Ordinary people, the authors observed, behaved as if the statues were the real individuals they depicted. History, of course, is replete with similar

moments of “collective madness,” from the destruction of the Vendôme column and the recurrently assaulted Lenin monument in wartime London to Budapests disgraced Stalin 2 of 1956. Yet the encounter with Communist monuments in the early 1990s was particular not solely because of its ideological content and the sheer numbers involved,

but also because of its supra-national dimension. Some of the “disgraced monuments” ended up demolished, others stored indefinitely, purchased, shipped, and displayed in private collections in Western Europe (the image of a huge disembodied head of Lenin

floating across a Central European river was memorably captured in Theo Angelopoulos

1995 filmUlysses Gaze). Centrally planned economies may have ultimately failed, but they seem to have

 I am thankful to Eriola Pira (NYU) for introducing me to the Irmgard Coninx Foundation. 1  See Laura Mulvey, “Reflections on Disgraced Monuments,” in Neil Leach (ed.),Architecture and Revolutionand New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 219-227. The issue, as well as a broader (London discussion of similar episodes going back to the French Revolution and a detailed account of the fate of Communist monuments, is taken up in Dario Gamboni,The Destruction of Art(London: Reaktion Books, 1997), Chapter 3 “The Fall of the “Communist Monuments,” pp. 51-90. See also Adrian Forty, “Introduction,” in Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (eds.),The Art of Forgetting (Materializing Culture) (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1-18. 2  On wartime London, see Joe Kerr, “Lenins Bust! Unlikely Allies in Wartime London,” in Iain Borden, Jane Rendell, Joe Kerr and Alicia Pivaro (eds.),Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 16-21.

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successfully generated first-hand material for a far-reaching and flourishing post- communist trade in relics and material culture. As Thomas Lahusen has put it, “the building of socialism, in its concrete and metaphorical sense, was in a state of constant 3 decayin ruinsfrom the very beginning.” Beyond concrete monuments and disgraced statues, countless images and artifacts have persisted or reemerged as the recognizable residual symbols of a bygone era. Shared by foreigners and those who lived under 4 Communist rule alike, such recognition brings up worthy questions about remembrance.

Some of the points outlined in this paper deal with the interplay of transition politics and commemoration, as well as the tension between projects that focus on past repression and crimes as opposed to those constituting the “Communist experience industry.”   Fallen Bodies Many of Tiranas disgraced statuesLenin missing a limb, Hoxha with his nose punched outended up in a massive warehouse on the edge of the city. During a visit there in 2006, I came across local sculptors using scraps of metal from the statues to craft their own works, in a kind of private “recycling” of socialist realism. An attempt a few years ago to revive socialist realism at the National Gallery produced a special pavilion for smaller versions of these sculpturesgrinning workers, beaming peasants, stern Chinese cultural revolutionariesstacked up in an overcrowded blue room. Newspapers wrote at length about the “resurrection,” but the aging authors of the works were reluctant to have their past dragged back into public light. Recently the initiative has revived but with a sharper focus on “unconventional” socialist realism. Nowhere is this troubled legacy of the Communist era more apparent than in Tiranas heart, a gigantic square spilling out in front of the marbled Palace of Culture, whose first stone was laid by Khrushchev in 1959. The site where Hoxhas oversize statue used to stand remains eerily vacant. Once, you could still see the original pedestal covered in

 3  Thomas Lahusen, “Decay or Endurance? The Ruins of Socialism,”Slavic Review 65: 4 (Winter 2006): 736-746, p. 736.  4  On the distinction between national memory and collective memory, the latter being the focus of the discussion in this paper, see Jan Werner Müller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power, and the Power over Memory,” in Müller (ed.)Memory and Power in Post-War Europe(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-38.

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graffiti wishing a “long life” not to Hoxha, as was customary, but to George H. W. Bush (see fig. 1). Similar to Georgi Dimitrovs memorial in Sofia, the site became inscribed 5 with poignant political gestures before completely disintegrating. Today the ground is barren, looking much like the haunting site of a ceremonial purge (see fig. 2). Once kept intentionally empty to underscore Hoxhas commanding height, the surrounding area now hosts a raucous makeshift mini-theme park for small children. What currently make up the heart of the capital, then, are a scar and a playground. You get the sense that its

almost impossible to fill this colossal square with anything else (until, at any rate, the implementation of the new French-designed master plan) but fleeting structures and cheap entertainment. The fallen bodies are locked away, rotting, but still haunting the city. It is extremely difficult to locate nostalgia here, amidst the lingering legacy of Hoxhas virulent regime. That is not to say that forms of nostalgia are completely absent, but they remain mostly unarticulated. Elsewhere, though, the fallen bodies have reemerged on display. Budapests Szoborpark (“statue-park”) surfaced as a modest showcase of various displaced statues and memorials to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Béla Kun. “By the parks enormous entrance,” the visitor finds out, “a pair of bootsall that remain from Stalins statue

demolished in 1956welcomes the visitor.” The boots “are displayed on top of an original size architectural replica of the grandstand used by communist leaders.” And then:

Barracks are set up on “Witness Square” in front of the park and provide room for spectacular exhibitions and film showings about the era. A Trabant is displayed in the parking lot, open for visitors to get in. A wide variety of retro-souvenirs, communist music CDs (sic), Red army medals, Soviet souvenirs, posters, books and other paraphernalia from the era is 6 available at the shop.  Szoborparkremains an “unfinished project since 1994,” but it has more recently evolved into Memento Park, expanding what used to be a hint of the “material experience” under Communism well beyond the uprooted statues. Nevertheless, a tension persists between

 5  Maria Todorova, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov aslieu de mémoire,”The Journal of Modern History78 (June 2006): 377-411.  6  Various promotional materials are available at the old website: <http://www.szoborpark.hu/old> (accessed: June 27, 2009). For the new website, see <http://www.szoborpark.hu>. 

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the memorial and the choreographed display of statues, which would have never been presented so close to each other in any Soviet bloc city.Szoborpark, in fact, inhabits a tourist-packed ambiguous space between a museum, a memorial, and a flea market of “Communist stuff” spilling out of the Red Star store. While Tiranas ruined Lenins decay unattended, in Budapest there is a conscious attempt to reassemble and display the crumbling pieces into a refashioned context.   Recreating Communism A similar project near Druskininkai, Lithuania, goes even further than Szoborpark. Established by a colorful local entrepreneur with a former career in wrestling, the Grūtas park expands the context around the displayed statues by including exhibitions, paintings, and even a reconstructed childrens playground with the vastly familiar standardized steel elements that were so ubiquitous throughout the Soviet bloc. No wonder the parks informal designation (Stalins World) conveys not only the sense of an ominous theme

park but also the promise of anexperiencerather than mere remembrance. Not surprisingly, the development has sparked a good deal of controversy but visitors come in droves. Some have been troubled by the inclusion of watchtowers resembling the recognizable structures of the Gulag. The juxtaposition of somber statues against the dramatic frosty landscape, furthermore, lends a grotesque feeling to the whole panorama, made even more poignant by the image of groups of children noisily running around the park. So what does it mean to choreograph comic effects next to reminders of the Stalinist terror? Can it actually be seen as an attempted microcosm of a society under Communist rule or is it merely a designed snapshot? The tension between the comic and the mundane on the one hand and the tragic and the exceptional on the other is similarly palpable in Berlins GDR Museum. Promising visitors “a hands-on experience of everyday life” under Communism, the exhibition is 7 conceived as a series of prefab housing replicas. Complete with a fully recreated standard GDR apartment, the museum focuses on issues like transportation, youth,

 7  Robert Rückel (ed.),The GDR Museum. A Guide to the Permanent Exhibition. A Hands-On Experience of Everyday Life, (Berlin: DDR Museum Verlag, 2006). 

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education, work, consumption, housing, media, fashion and leisure. Early critics pointed to the glaringly minimal preoccupation with state repression. Indeed, the exhibits small- scale model of Berlins border controls and the poorly lit corner packed with Stasi surveillance equipment seem inadequate. But here the tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary under Communist rule is made much more visible, if perhaps unintentionally so. What ultimately makes the show work is almost superfluous to its content: The venue, in a prime location along the Spree, is too small to adequately host the eager throngs of tourists so the whole experience leaves visitors with the deeply unsettling feeling of being trapped, forever crammed among the miniatureplattenbauthat double as display boards and pull-out drawers preserving aged artifacts. Similar projects, though less aptly marketed and publicized, have popped up over the years in what used to be the Soviet bloc. Few have even attempted to capture the complex interplay under Communist rule of repression and identity-shaping social policies, or the economics of everyday life under central planning with the extraordinary suffering of those who were silenced, banished, or killed. There is the Museum of Communism in Prague (established by an American entrepreneur in the bagel business), which maximizes theOstalgie for the Communist artifact. That project, however, stands more as a testament to the quick thinking of a handful of enterprising Westerners (who recognized early on the marketing potential of the disintegrating Communist material world) rather than any coherent curatorial concept. In stark contrast to Prague, the fear- inducing House of Terror in Budapest establishes a dark parallel between Communist 8 repression and the local experience of inter-war fascism. Once housing the headquarters of the Hungarian fascist organization Arrow Cross, the museums venue also used to host the Communist state security police until 1956. Shortly after the opening, the museum drew criticism for downplaying the fascist past in a thinly veiled attempt to sharpen the 9 assault against the Communist past. The debate that followed brings to mind Tzvetan Todorovs typology of responses to the comparison of Communist and Nazi crimes, in

 8  For an incisive analysis, see István Rév,Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005). 9  For a comparative overview, see Arnold Bartetzky, “Visualisierung der Diktaturerfahrung: Der Kommunismus im Museum,” in Arnold Bartetzky, Marina Dmitrieva, and Stefan Troebst (eds.),Neue Staatenneue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral- und Osteuropa seit 1918(Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), pp. 221-23. 

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which ones conscious or unconscious identification with victims or perpetrators 10 determines in large measure the reaction to such a comparison. Warsaws museum of Communism, on the other hand, still remains an idea. Its

nameSocLandconjures up the kind of ambition that has gone into the planning. It is

supposed to be located underneath the capitals most prominent and almost universally

detested building: the mammoth Palace of Culture and Science, a Soviet gift to the Polish people erected in the 1950s (notice the parallel history running between Tirana and Warsaw). At the forefront of this effort has been a noted local figure, Czesław Bielecki, an architect andSolidarnośćactivist and publisher who became a member of the Polish parliament. “In the Holocaust Memorial Museum,” he recently told the BBC, “Americans had to build Auschwitz-like architecture to show what was the Holocaust.” “Here we have natural, genuine socialist-communist architecture,” he went on, “we have the 11 monster, and we just have to reinterpret this gigantic totalitarian architecture.” Among

other ideas, Bielecki has proposed placing an enormous decapitated Stalin in front of the façade (see fig. 4). Early ideas also suggested multimedia rooms where visitors faces could be instantly integrated within projected recordings of historical events like mass

rallies or the Gdansk protests. A widely publicized campaign solicited “socialist objects” from ordinary Poles to build the museums collections. As reported, many came forward with brochures, medals, books, magazines, appliances, hairdryers, and clothes. And while some Polish commentators have warned of a Disneyland syndrome, not unlike the Grūtas model, Bielecki warns instead of a “loss of memory” in Poland and Central and Eastern

Europe. But even beyond political and financial hurdles, it remains unclear how to integrate within a single museum both the violent history of repression and the more mundanebut distinct and bloc-wideaspects of everyday life, like the intense shortages and the long lines, or the thriving black market for Western goods.

 10  According to Todorov, “there are groups whose national or ideological positions cause them to identify, albeit unconsciously, with one or the other side.” Depending on whether one identifies with Nazi or Communist perpetrators or victims, the comparison could either be seen as an excuse for Nazi crimes or as a welcome gesture in identifying the evil nature of Communist regimes. The model rests, however, on the assumed superiority of Nazi crimes as the ultimate evil, or the “gloomy eminence” Todorov writes about, a view that he argues is shared by “most people.” Tzvetan Todorov,Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 75 and Chapter 2, “Two of a Kind,” pp. 74-112. 11  “The End of Solidarity,”Our World, Brian Hanrahan, BBC News Channel, 7 June 2009. 

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       1Hoxhas empty plinth in Tirana, 1993. Personal collection.        

       2The site of Hoxhas statue in Tirana, 2006. Authors photograph.          

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3Stalin in a warehouse in Tirana, 2006.  Authors photograph.

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 4(Soc-Land museum, Warsaw, project.  Dom i Miasto (DIM), http://www.dim84.kotbury.pl

It is a story repeated across the former Communist world: buildings haunted by crimes of the pastoften now converted into museumsthat serve as spontaneous memorials, almost refusing extensive curatorial work, guided tours, and permanent displays. Even more striking is the fact that in the presence of so much memory, official

memorials and museums devoted to the recent Communist past are few. Even those built,

as already seen here, are limited to Westerners business models or small-scale private initiatives. Debates on remembrance have been fiery and frequent, from those in the media (the debates in Germany, France, and Italy onThe Black Book of Communism) to those in Brussels (the European Parliaments arguments over the formal condemnation of 12 Communist crimes). But commemoration still remains a thorny issue. There is, perhaps, no immediate need for museums of Communism in places where former Communist elitesor their offspringstill enjoy high claims on power and ownership, as is the case in Albania. There, the former victims remain politically marginalized and are unable to

shape the discourse on remembrance. Even what little has been built, as well as the prospect of generations with no living memory of the Communist era, shows that remembrance in the former Communist world poses distinct challenges.

  Conclusions

In sum, I would suggest three things: How Communism has been remembered, or not, has in large part reflected the social and political dynamics set in motion after its collapse. There are no serious plans for similar museums in Russia (there is a small

museum devoted to the Gulag in Moscow, but it is extremely modest). Communist symbolic references in Russia have retained their power over the years, nourished by a 13 strong ethnic identification with the recent past. In Hungary and Poland, it has been possible to push farther for commemoration, especially by focusing on the “Soviet”

 12  See Anson Rabinbach, “Moments of Totalitarianism,”History and Theory45 (February 2006): 72-100. For the Italian debates, see Giulio Pietrangelis “Sul peggiore dei mondi possibili. Il libro nero del comunismo nel dibattito italiano,”Italia Contemporanea211 (June 1998): 399-410. For the German n. debates, see Jens Mecklenburg and Wolfgang Wippermann (eds.),“Roter Holocaust”? Kritik des Schwarzbuchs des Kommunismus(Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1998). 13  Alexander Etkind, “Fear of the Past: The Cultural Memory of State Terror in Russia,” talk for the Davis Center for History, Princeton University, March 6, 2008. 

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origin of the system or by emphasizing dramatic points like 1956 or theSolidarność legacy. Given the persistence of Communist-era elites, institutions, and an overwhelmingly chaotic transition, commemoration in Albania has proven much more

difficult.

Beyond these plain differences, there are also strong similarities. The second point is that the Communist system is widely remembered as a “lost civilization” that left behind not only slogans and objects, but also practices and a specific kind of knowledge based 14 on a non-capitalist version of modernity. Precisely because it presented a worldview

and shaped a familiar world of objects, efforts of remembrancewhere they existlook familiar across Eurasia. A museum of CommunismsAlltagsgeschichtebe would recognizable whether in Berlin, Moscow, or Tirana. The specific nature of this shared 15 memory, however, is not fully captured in claims of global explosions of memory. Finally, the challenge for practitioners is to navigate through all of this: to address both state repression and everyday life; to recognize the vast similarities that the Communist system brought upon vastly different countries, while obviously engaged with specific national memory; and, finally, to develop new forms of remembrance that 16 do not ignore, but cannot replicate, those of the Holocaust. Like the modernity

envisioned by the Communism system, this may be the ultimate utopian project. [2500] 

 14  See Stephen Kotkin, “Mongol Commonwealth: Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space,”Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8:3(Summer 2007): 487-531.  15 Pierre Nora,Rethinking France: Les lieux de mémoire, ed. David P. Jordan, trans. Mary Trouille, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 16  On the limitations and contradictions of the remembrance of the Holocaust, see Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,”The New York Review of Books56:12 (16 July 2009). 

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