A Tribute to Barren Shops.(Museum of Communism)(Brief Article)

The Museum of Communism is easy to miss, nestled among the foreign- owned chain stores in Prague's main shopping district. Housed in the elegant Palace Savarin, the museum is bordered on one side by a McDonald's and on the other by a casino. Visitors walk through a sweeping, red-carpeted foyer--and enter into another era. Inside they can sit in a classroom decorated with Soviet and Czechoslovak flags, as well as a poem extolling the virtues of tractors. A replica of a barren shop stocks just two types of tinned food. "Visitors who see the Benettons and Pizza Huts don't get an idea of how different life was," says Glenn Spicker, the museum's creator. "The younger generation has not been told the whole story by their parents because everyone's too busy living a new life."

Twelve years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Museum of Communism has opened to remind them of what the old life was like. Now Czechs-- and tourists--can take a break from the world of high-speed travel, hypermarkets and start-ups to visit a chilling reproduction of an interrogation room, complete with ancient typewriter and brightly shining lamp, where the secret police forced people to sign confessions. Stanislav Stransky, chairman of the Czech Association of Former Political Prisoners, says the museum is an important step toward helping the country come to terms with its past. "People just don't talk about the communist period and the difficulties," he says. "But young people need to be reminded how life was."

It took an American businessman to make it happen. Spicker, 36, spent several months and $28,000 scouring markets and junk shops for close to 1,000 items of memorabilia, including Russian textbooks, anti-American posters, chemical-warfare protection suits and statues of Lenin and Marx. A former student of politics, Spicker was passing through central Europe in the late 1980s when the Velvet Revolution toppled Czechoslovakia's communist regime. He decided to stay on and capitalize on all the new business opportunities, opening up a jazz club and a string of bars and restaurants in Prague. Then he hit on the idea for the museum. "As a student I found communism fascinating because of the influence it had on all aspects of people's lives," he says. "But now its fascination for me is just ...