Victims of Communism Museum Review: A Red Reminder
By Dominic Green, July 6, 2022, WSJ

The Victims of Communism Museum, a $40 million project that opened here last month, is the world’s first museum dedicated to the victims of the most murderous ideology in modern times. With three permanent galleries and nearly 10,000 square feet of
space in a Beaux Arts mansion at McPherson Square, this museum delivers a short, shocking history lesson in brutality and deceit, along with inspiring studies in courage and a jarring relevance.

The museum—curated by Elizabeth Spalding and Lee Edwards of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by an Act of Congress in 1993, and funded by private donors and gifts from the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia and
Latvia—provides an account of the complexities of revolutionary theory that is clear. Communism, we read on a screen in the first gallery, “Remembering the Victims,” is “a system of centralized power in which a single-party dictatorship abolishes
private property and controls the means of production and the distribution of goods and services.” The practice is also simple: “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes . . . rely on force, use brutality, and repress
speech, religion, assembly, and all other rights and freedoms.” Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, we read, more than 100 million people have been killed by Communist regimes.

“Remembering the Victims” moves efficiently from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin’s launch of the global Comintern in 1919, and the early years of Stalin’s dictatorship.
A timeline traces how Marx’s manifesto developed into Engels’s “scientific socialism” and how Trotsky and Lenin seized the moment in 1917. The jerky footage of Bolsheviks in the streets of czarist Russia might seem ancient history to younger
visitors. But the crisp photographs on the opposite wall—child soldiers in Nicaragua, civil war and famine in Ethiopia, forced labor in North Korea—show that communism, a European ideology from the age of empires, was the last imperial export in the
era of decolonization.

The second gallery, “Repression,” shows the great leap forward into tyranny. The curators estimate that 20 million people disappeared into the hidden network of labor camps and prisons that Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “gulag archipelago.”
The Victims of Communism Museum uses the modern museum strategies of moral exemplars, eyewitness testimony and physical evidence to avoid replicating an impersonal, dehumanizing system.

Mural-scale photographs are accompanied by quotations from the Polish officer Witold Pilecki and the Czechoslovakian politician Milada Horáková, who resisted the Nazis and were executed by the Communists. A montage of drawings from inmates in Russia,
China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea documents constant beatings, torture and starvation, and the struggle to stay human. Display cases contain the small suitcase of personal possessions that Soviet prisoners were allowed to take with them; the daily
ration, a hunk of rough bread about four slices thick; and a “bread bag,” stitched by an inmate to protect the bread against rats and theft.

“Resistance,” the third gallery, depicts how Communist regimes hardened into mediocre police states. One wall is a giant screen, showing the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechoslovakians in 1968 facing Soviet tanks and massive repression. But the
Communists could not destroy their real enemy. This was not bourgeois capitalism, but the desire for freedom, symbolized by a samizdat Beatles record printed on an X-ray—perhaps the most noble copyright violation in the history of pop—or the million
worshipers at Pope John Paul II’s Mass in Warsaw in 1979. Visitors face the dilemmas of resistance by playing a multiple-choice game, its scenarios derived from the struggles of real people such as Joo-Wow, a child forced laborer in North Korea; and
Alex, an East German pastor who must decide between making his church a redoubt of the conscience and exposing his flock to the attentions of the Stasi.

Communism collapsed in Europe by popular demand. In China, however, the CCP repressed the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square. A tent, a banner and a bloodstained shirt from the protests are among the items in the rotating exhibition space upstairs.
The next show will be on Cuba and Venezuela.

Today, the museum tells us, some 1.5 billion people still live under communism, mostly in China. The Chinese regime calls itself a Communist Party, but it has restored private property, established a form of capitalist economy—“market-Leninism,”
the historian Niall Ferguson calls it—and reverted to authoritarian traditions that long predate Communist ideology. It is good that a museum designed for school trips pushes its moral into a present that struggles to remember the recent past. As Vá
clav Havel said, the “fundamental threat” to communism’s empire of lies was “speaking the truth.”

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