Skip to main content
NEU job vacancy
Prague wrestles with public pride in historic socialism
The problem with the National Museum’s exhibition on the communist-governed era is that the public liked it and the values it represented too much — looking at the beggars under the bridge outside, who can blame them, writes JOHN CALLOW
Reliefs cast into 1950s gates show a socialist selection of Czech history

WHEN is a museum not a museum? This is the question that the Czech National Museum poses in its new exhibition, Collections & Politics, exploring the themes and narratives that underpinned the presentation of the past under socialism.

After November 1989, those museums dedicated to the working-class movement and its leaders were closed, while the surviving institutions were overhauled and reconfigured in light of the seismic political, economic, and cultural shift to neoliberalism.

As a consequence, much was lost — destroyed, despised, or sold off to collectors — and what was left of the socialist past was shuttered away in basements and storage units, out of sight, and only brought to mind through “ironic” expositions that thoroughly de-contextualised and frequently mocked the artefacts.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Arthur Ashe
Men’s tennis / 5 September 2025
5 September 2025

Still the only black man to win the US Open tennis title, a statue of the legendary champion, Arthur Ashe, is now the only one remaining on Monument Avenue in his Richmond, Virginia hometown, where confederate leaders of the Civil War were also once displayed, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

WON’T BE SILENCED: Petra Proksanova, head of the Youth Committee of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) and leader of the Stacilo (anti-capitalist and anti-cuts) movement in the upcoming elections
Features / 5 July 2025
5 July 2025

As the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia rebuilds support through anti-cuts campaigns, the government seeks to silence it before October’s parliamentary elections through liberal totalitarianism, reports JOHN CALLOW

Memorial candles are lit during a Holocaust Memorial Day com
Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 / 27 January 2025
27 January 2025
The proponents and enablers of Holocaust distortion and anti-communism now have increasing political power and influence in a number of European countries, obstructing an understanding of the reality of fascism’s crimes, warns MARY DAVIS
James Boswell, Two studies of a man with a chain through his
Exhibition Review / 7 November 2024
7 November 2024
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s