A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism Read Online Free

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.
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    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