Museum of Communism

Three minutes west of the Municipal House lies the Museum of Communism, a museum dedicated to the country’s and the city’s recent past. The Museum of Communism at V Celnici 1031/4.  The museum provides a suggestive view of the following aspects of life in Communist-era Czechoslovakia: daily life, politics, history, sports, economics, education, art (specifically Socialist Realism). It also includes many examples of propaganda in the media, the People’s Militias, the army, the police (including the secret police, the StB).

The list goes on with stories of censorship, and courts and other institutes of repression, including show trials and political labor camps during the Stalinist era. It focuses in particular on the totalitarian regime that ruled the country from the February putsch in 1948 until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Housed in a space of nearly 1,500 m2, the museum provides visitors with an authentic feel of the era that is enhanced by the incorporation of short videos, posters, and artifacts.

The exhibit includes interestingly designed spaces, where visitors can walk through mock-ups of a shock worker’s workshop, a school classroom, a child’s bedroom, and an interrogation room. We have also selected interesting items from our vast collection of materials that illustrate what daily life under Communism was like.

Everything is described on 62 panels divided into thematic sections, which are enriched with a great amount of photographic material from the Archive of the Czech News Agency, the Security Services Archive, the Archive of the Association of Forced Military Camp Laborers, and the personal collections of leading Czech photographers. More