Description: 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.
Review Quotes:
"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 Drakulic, 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