For the Victims of Communism
By DINITIA SMITH
Published: December 23, 1995
There would be a Hall of Infamy with a piece of the Berlin wall, a re-creation of the gulag and a Hall of Heroes with statues of anti-Communists like Ronald Reagan and Andrei D. Sakharov. There would be a big statue of the Goddess of Democracy. That's how a group of prominent conservatives envisions a proposed $100 million Victims of Communism Memorial Museum, honoring an estimated 100 million people killed in this century because of Communism.
The group includes Lev E. Dobriansky, chairman of the Captive Nations Committee; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who also advises Speaker Newt Gingrich on tax policy, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Lee Edwards, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation says fund-raising will begin in January. Mr. Edwards is a biographer of Barry Goldwater and senior editor of The World and I, a magazine owned by The Washington Times, founded by the Rev. Sung Myung Moon. The foundation hopes to house the museum in the Old Tariffs Building in Washington, and to open it by December 2000.
This isn't the first time there has been an attempt to build a memorial to victims of Communism. Three years ago, a German entrepreneur said he was planning a re-creation of the old East Germany, complete with empty stores, gritty toilet paper and secret police. Last spring, a group in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area said it was planning a theme park about the Berlin wall, with visitors to be greeted by soldiers announcing: "Border patrol! Hand over your ID's! Open the trunk!" Neither plan has been carried out.
The Washington group is taking its cue from the success of other Washington attractions, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "I favor it for the same reason I favor the Holocaust Museum," Mr. Brzezinski said. "Horrible crimes were committed in the name of utopians and on the bones of people defined by race. Now another museum is to be built for those defined by class."
Mr. Dobriansky said: "The Holocaust Museum deals with outright genocide. In our case, it's only slightly genocide." But "over 100 million were slaughtered, tortured or perished as a result of the Bolsheviks."
Three years ago, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, introduced legislation in Congress, which was signed by President Clinton, authorizing the National Captive Nations Committee to raise funds for a memorial. The committee has lobbied for countries under Communism since 1959.
"There's a great deal of revisionist history going on; millions of bodies have been airbrushed out of the picture," Mr. Rohrabacher said. "Kids today don't even understand there's a Berlin wall. While I have no doubt there is a moral equivalent between Communism and Nazism, there will be some controversy, I imagine."
Indeed, Stephen Cohen, a Princeton University specialist in Russian affairs, calls the proposed memorial, "the triumphalist victory of cold-war warriors."
"It's a political event," said Professor Cohen. "With this kind of hyperbole, with money coming from people sermonizing against Communism, it's hard to imagine it as a serious research center."