 Nick
Holdsworth
Prague
A quarter-page ad in the Prague Pill - the Czech capital´s newest
free listings magazine - displays a bold portrait of Vladimir Lenin
beneath a copy line peppered with Cyrillic-style lettering: "Down
the road from Benetton. Next door to Mickey D's. Guess who's turning
in his embalming fluid?"
In smaller lettering, like a choker around Lenin´s neck, it carries
the legend: "Museum of Communism. The way it was."
The Czech Republic's first museum devoted to the country´s 40 years
under communist regimes does not shrink from displaying its capitalist
colours- hardly surprising given that its founder and owner is a 36-yearold
American political science graduate who has spent the past ten years
running restaurants and coffee shops in Prague.
Glenn Spicker, the founder of a museum that many Czechs, 12 years after
the velvet revolution, still consider in bad taste; does not hide the
fact that the museum celebrates the triumph of capitalism over communism.
Based on the concept of a "three-act tragedy”, the exhibits are
designed to reflect the dream, reality and nightmare of communism.
Mr. Spicker, who did postgraduate studies in Soviet politics at Essex
University after taking his first degree at the University of Connecticut,
collected all the exhibits himself, scouring Prague's junk shops and
flea markets.
"I had first talked about this idea with friends years ago, but
did nothing about it. Now I figured was the right time as there is a
great interest in the communist period,” said Mr. Spicker, who has lived
in Prague since 1992.
Retired Charles University professor Cestmir Kracmar was drafted in
to write the texts for the exhibits, and documentary filmmaker Jan Kaplan
was brought in as conceptual designer. . Early visitors to the museum
which opened just after Christmas - were mainly foreign tourists, but
Mr. Spicker said a small number of mostly elderly Czechs have come by
to see how an American businessman inter- prets their postwar past.
A grim reconstruction of a secret police interrogation cell records
the blunt statistics of repression:178 executions by 1989, 257,000 prison
sentences for political offences, 200,000 paid police spies, 500,000
party members expelled during the purges that followed the crushing
of the Prague Spring in :1968.
Swedish tourist Kristian Svenberg; who was a student in Czechoslovakia
in the late 1960s, said he felt little of the true atmosphere of the
period but plenty of the current political spin: "Of course, for
the Czech people the period was a disaster, although, they still don't
understand that simply swapping: this past for the culture of the dollar
is not the answer."
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