Authors

Samantha Vaughn¹;  ¹ Newcastle University, UK

Discussion

When Duncan Light labelled Communist heritage “unwanted” in 2000, he was reflecting the fractured debates surrounding the continued presence of that which was left over from the Communist era, from buildings to objects. On the one hand, there was a need to construct post-Communist identities, “in which there is little desire to remember the communist past” (Light 2000: 147), and on the other, an influx of Western tourists come to gaze upon the material legacy of the Communist past. Today, as at the start of the millennium, many of these debates surrounding Communist heritage revolve primarily around issues of how the past is remembered and the usefulness it has for today, with museums of Communism being a flash point for examining this. In their role as custodians of memory, they can be seen as tracing a long path from condemnation of Communism in the early 1990s to nostalgia at the turn of the century, leaving the museum landscape in a state of contestation. 

These debates, however, only address on one side of Duncan’s argument, choosing to foreground the way this existing material legacy has been interpreted and used at the expense of any discussion about the perspective of Western tourists who come to see Communist heritage. This paper brings the focus back to this subset of visitors. Drawing on interviews conducted with visitors to the Museum of Communism in Prague, Czechia, and the Museum of Life Under Communism in Warsaw, Poland, I examine the experiences of foreign visitors at these institutions and question whether they still pose a problem to post-Communist identity construction as Light wrote in 2000. I offer some reflections of why foreign visitors can be the perfect audience for Communist history museums whilst also addressing why such institutions are so important in our current historical moment.