New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe
A companion website to the edited volume with the same name, Museums of Communism explores the complicated connections between history, commemoration, nostalgia, and victimization made evident in new museums constructed after 1991.
Museum of Socialist Art, Sofia, Bulgaria
Opened in September 2011, the Museum presents works from the period of Socialist rule in Bulgaria (1944–1989). Over 70 works of monumental sculpture are exhibited in a park covering 7,500 sq.m. On a special pedestal, the large five-pointed star that once crowned the former Party House in the center of Sofia is on display. In a hall of an area of 550 sq. m., temporary exhibitions based on a content and thematic principle show present ideological forms of art. Archival and documentary films are projected in a video room. The shop offers cataloges and a variety of promotional materials and souvenirs. https://nationalgallery.bg/bg/visiting/museum-of-socialist-art/
Prison Museum, Tobolsk, Russia
The Prison Castle is the most mysterious architectural complex of the Tobolsk Kremlin. It used to be the strictest Russian prison until 1989, when the Prison Castle stopped its activity; today it is a museum of Siberian exile.
Here you can learn about everyday life of the prisoners from the tsarist and Soviet eras
"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
“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, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany, The New School
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, Director of the Wende Museum, Los Angeles
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, Memory, the City, and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe