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Museums of Communism
New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe
Edited by Stephen M. Norris
Published by: Indiana University Press
442 Pages, 89 b&w illus.
- eBook
- 9780253050311
- Published: November 2020
$39.99
- eBook
- 9780253052346
- Published: November 2020
$39.99
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How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.
Introduction: From Communist Museums to Museums of Communism: An Introduction / Stephen M. Norris
Exhibit A: Hall of Genocide, Occupation, and Terror
1. Sovereignty, Terror, and Suffering in the Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania / Neringa Klumbytė
2. Visualizing Revisionism: Europeanized Anticommunism at the House of Terror Museum in Budapest / Máté Zombory
3. Inside L'viv's Lonsky Prison: Capturing Ukrainian Memory after Communism / Stephen M. Norris
4. Remembering the Gulag in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan / Steven Barnes
5. Riga's Cheka House: From a Soviet Place of Terror to a Latvian Site of Remembrance? / Katja Wezel
Exhibit B: Hall of National Tragedies
6. Sensing the Uprising: The Warsaw Uprising Museum and the Emotions of the Past / Stephen M. Norris
7. Enforcing National Memory, Remembering Famine's Victims: The National Museum "Holodomor Victims Memorial"/ Daria Mattingly
Exhibit C: Hall of Everyday Life
8. The Czech Museum of Communism: What National Narrative for the Past? / Muriel Blaive
9. Stasiland or Spreewald Pickles? The Battle over the GDR in Berlin's DDR Museum / Stephen M. Norris
Exhibit D: Hall of Russian Memory
10. Commemorating and Forgetting Soviet Repression: Moscow's State Museum of GULAG History / Jeffrey Hardy
11. The Butovskii Shooting Range: History of an Unfinished Museum / Julie Fedor and Tomas Sniegon
12. Museum of Soviet Arcade Games: Nostalgia for a Socialist Childhood / Roman Abramov
Exhibit E: Rotating Exhibits
13. A Museum of a Museum? Fused and Parallel Historical Narratives in the Joseph Stalin State Museum / Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen
14. Between Occupations and Freedoms: Memory, Narrative, and Practice at Vabamu in Tallinn, Estonia / A. Lorraine Kaljund
Index
Stephen M. Norris is Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University. He is author of Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism and editor of five books on Russian history and culture, including Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present.
"This book is precious because it demonstrates how people from former communist countries reconstructed their past after 1989—this time in museums. These reconstructions used horrible pasts, invented pasts, pasts built on memories and emotions, on myths and even reality, but always only the past, not history."
~Slavenka Drakulić, author of A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism
"We are living in a time when symbols and the language of power are being sharply contested all over the world. This extraordinary book explores the production and performance of national identity in sites of memory in Eastern Europe, and the observations, insights, and revelations contained in the fourteen chapters help to make sense of and contextualize what we read in the news. This brilliant volume should be essential reading for anyone interested in how history and national identity converge. "
~Justinian Jampol, Executive Director / Founder, The Wende Museum
"With the increasing attention to questions of memory politics the world over, and in eastern Europe in particular, this volume's excellent survey of key post-communist memory sites could not be more timely. The case studies here will be useful not only to specialists in the respective countries, but to anyone trying to understand European memory culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries."
~Uilleam Blacker, University College London
"Museums of Communism is an indispensable account of how museums produce the present out of the Soviet-era past through the use of history, memory, and materiality. With a discerning eye and deep expertise, the cases show how long-silenced sufferings and disclaimed life experiences alike turn into cries for recognition, legitimation, and explanation. Its fine-grained account of how voices, objects, images, and spaces become constitutive of new narratives—both in the service and shadow of today's states—makes it a major empirical and analytical contribution to urgent discussions about memorializing difficult heritage today at the local, national, and transnational levels."
~Jonathan Bach, author of What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany, The New School
"The chapters do present a series of stimulating (and sometimes provocative) case studies about the situation in particular countries. It is a book which will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers with interests in the post-communist world and more broadly in issues of post-communist memory politics."
~Duncan Light, Bournemouth University Business School, Eurasian Geography and Economics
"Both empirically and theoretically, this volume manages the rare trick of adding up to much more than the sum of its parts; it is essential reading for all scholars and students of Eastern European memory politics and museology."
~Polly Jones - University College, Oxford, The Russian Review
https://www.museumsofcommunism.com/