Remembering the victims of communism.

Culture of Coercion

John H. Fund takes us on a tour of the growing number of museums and memorials that honor the victims of the twentieth century's most accomplished killers.

This year ground will be broken for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington (www.victimsofcommunism.org). The site on Capitol Hill was donated through a bill signed by President Clinton, and 75% of the necessary private funds have been raised for a 10-foot bronze replica of the "Goddess of Liberty" statue, which Chinese dissidents erected in Tiananmen Square before both it and their movement were crushed by tanks in 1989. The statue's inscriptions will both mourn the "more than 100 million victims of Communism" and call for the freedom of "all captive nations and peoples."

Nearby, the son of the late U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is planning a brick-and-mortar version of his online Cold War Museum (www.coldwar.org) at a former Nike missile site in Lorton, Va. Washington's impressive International Spy Museum (www.spymuseum.org) focuses on Cold War espionage. It features bizarre stories such as how Western diplomats stationed in Soviet bloc countries who ordered dress shoes from back home would have them intercepted on the way, with a bug fitted in a heel before delivery.

But the largest U.S. collection of Cold War artifacts and archives is housed in Los Angeles's new Wende Museum (www.wendemuseum.org). Founder Justinian Jampol became fascinated by life behind the Iron Curtain as a child, and now spends much of his time overseas gathering up its icons in the hope that scholars can learn how totalitarians manipulate culture to stay in power. Many of his 50,000 items, including personal papers of communist leaders and cars of the period, are in storage. But on display are logbooks of border guards that record the collapse of the Berlin Wall as it occurred, as well as toys designed to encourage fealty to the state.

In May, a new DDR Museum (ddr-museum.de/en) will open in Berlin, dedicated to showing ordinary life behind the Wall. Just as the Sachsenhausen camp reminds Berlin visitors of the Nazi horrors, two chilling museums illustrate communism's drive to crush "hostile negative elements."

The most haunting is the Hohenschönhausen interrogation center (www.stiftung-hsh.de), where "guests" were tortured in a row of subterranean cells dubbed "the U-boat." They included water-torture cells and some so small one could only stand in them. In later years, the jailers perfected psychological torture that stripped prisoners of all their defenses. Today's guides to the center were all former political prisoners there.

A 15-minute drive away is the headquarters of the Stasi, the feared secret police agency that was given an unlimited budget by a paranoid Politburo (www.stasi-museum.de).

But Budapest has done the best at making the alternately drab and chilling reality of communism come alive. Absolute Tours (www.absolutetours.com) runs an excellent "Hammer and Sickle" walk that includes an excursion to Statue Park--a sort of cemetery for extinct Marxist dinosaurs.

Downtown Budapest has the House of Terror (www.terrorhaza.hu), a new museum that is the equal of Washington's Holocaust Museum in showing how dictatorships destroy civil society. Even the awning projects menace. It has the word "Terror" cut out of it, and in sunlight the word is projected onto the sidewalk below. From 1944-45 the building was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis, and hundreds of Jews and other enemies were executed in the basement.

After the city fell to the Soviets, the communist secret police moved in, finding the building also suited their methods. In "The Changing Room," a rotating mannequin wearing a fascist uniform on the front and a communist one on the back vividly illustrates the ease with which some Hungarians switched sides to serve new masters. A stirring exhibit shows how the Catholic Church refused to surrender its soul to the apparatchiks. A three-minute video has a guard explain execution methods as you descend in a slow-moving elevator to the basement torture chambers.

And last, and least:

Not surprisingly, Russia has resisted efforts to create museums about the communist era for the general public. For $700 one can tour Joseph Stalin's World War II bunker. Moscow's KGB Museum at the infamous Lubyanka Prison is open for $500 private group tours. But if you want to get close to KGB history for free, you might visit the hilltop villa at 4 Angelikastrasse in Dresden, Germany. Inside, an ambitious KGB agent named Vladimir Putin worked from 1985 to 1990 trying to forestall the collapse of communism.