By Paul Robinson, Website, 9/28/25

A while back, I was in Washington DC, and I visited the new Victims of Communism museum. My interest in this was piqued by the saga of the Victims of Communism monument here in Ottawa, which caused a scandal once it became known that many of the names people had paid to have inscribed on the monument were those of Nazi collaborators. I thought it would be interesting to see how the US museum compared.

I’m pleased to say that it’s not anything like the Ottawa monument. On the whole it does a decent job. That said, the historian in me did find a few claims in the museum that I questioned, and there was, I feel, a certain national bias that popped up here and there, largely in the form of Polish nationalism and in a tendency to portray Russian and Chinese people solely as perpetrators of communist atrocities and not as victims. This despite the fact that probably more Russian and Chinese people have perished as a result of communism than people of any other nationalities.

So let’s take a look. I will focus on the Soviet-related materials, not on those relating to China and elsewhere, as the former are more my area of expertise.

The museum is fairly small. It is conveniently located in downtown Washington and has the advantage of being free of charge. The staff were friendly, and on the day I went, there were not many people there.

The museum has three parts: a permanent exhibition on the ground floor that walks you through the history of communism; a display of paintings by a former Soviet Gulag prisoner; and while I was there, what seemed to be a temporary exhibition on the second floor about Vietnam. I’ll concentrate on the first of these parts.

As you start your tour, you see the following. This pretty much sets the tone for what follows: a lot of big red panels with historical descriptions and photos, but relatively few exhibits.

The general descriptions are fine, but I did have a slight quibble with the display below which says that a Provisional Government ‘led by Alexander Kerensky replaced the Tsarist regime.’ This isn’t strictly true, as the government that replaced the Tsarist regime was initially led by Prince G.E. Lvov and Kerensky only took over a few months later. So Kerensky didn’t replace the Tsar but replaced Lvov. It’s a very minor point, but I think that one should aim for 100% accuracy.

I had a slightly more serious quibble with this display which says that the ‘Soviet Red Army invaded Poland.’ This indeed it did, but not until after the Polish army invaded Soviet territory. This display would probably make most readers think that the Soviets started the Polish-Soviet war by launching an unprovoked attack on Poland, which isn’t entirely accurate.

Poles pop up again in this discussion of the Great Terror. On the one hand, the museum has done a good job in not exaggerating the scope of the terror. Indeed, the quoted number of deaths – 700,000 – is on the lower end of what current scholars believe the death toll to have been. I was struck, though, by the claim that nearly a third of victims of the Great Terror (200,000 people) were Poles. It is indeed true that Poles were disproportionately targeted during the Terror. But the number more normally cited is around 120,000. I think that the museum should probably stick with the numbers that are most commonly recognized.

Likewise, there seems to be exaggeration in this display that claims that 70% of the population of Kazakhstan died in the famine of 1932-33. Sarah Cameron, author of a widely-acclaimed book on the topic, puts the total at about one-third of the population. Again, that’s terrible enough, but it’s also far removed from 70%. I don’t know where the museum got that number from and it may need revisiting.

And there’s this panel, which gives a long list of nationalities whose members were ‘sent to the Gulag or other forced settlement areas of the USSR’. Russians are notably absent from the list, though of course very many of them were sent to the Gulag too. Now, it’s true that Russians were not targeted for deportation in toto in the manner of Crimean Tatars or Chechens, but neither were many of the other nationalities mentioned here. Soviet nationality policy also can’t be reduced to efforts ‘to destroy culture and impose conformity’. The Soviets invested a lot of resources into supporting minority languages (in some cases, creating alphabets and providing the first ever schools and literature in that language). Periods of Russification alternated with periods of ‘indigenization’, in which minority cultures were actively promoted and members of minorities given preference in their own republics. Soviet nationalities policy was much more complex than shown here.

Then we come to a bit of historical revisionism about the start of the Second World War:

To my mind, it’s not accurate to say ‘a joint invasion of Poland in September [1939] started World War II.’ The British and French declared war on Germany on 3 September. The Soviets didn’t enter Poland until 17 September, two weeks later. Now, it’s true that they were already committed to doing so before then, but the British and French didn’t respond to a ‘joint invasion’ of Poland, but to a German one.

Then, we come to the naming of Russians, as in the two panels below. The first is a quote from a Hungarian priest calling for ‘Russian troops’ to leave Hungary in 1956. The second is a mention of the ‘Russian’ army leaving the Baltic states in 1994. The two panels are entirely accurate. But it strikes me that the language used could serve to conflate the Soviet Union and Russia in the mind of any visitor who didn’t know the subject well. It thus reinforces the idea of Russians as perpetrators not as victims.

Overall, I would say that it is an interesting place to visit and a younger generation of visitors who know nothing about communism will learn much from it. That said, I have my doubts about museums and monuments focusing entirely on the victims of communism. This isn’t because I am remotely sympathetic to communist theory or practice. Far from it. It’s very correct that people should be reminded of the horrific crimes committed by communist regimes (as they should be of the crimes committed by regimes of other types). But when all you look at is that, it becomes very hard to explain things such as modern-day Soviet nostalgia. It also makes one wonder why on earth anybody would have supported such an ideology. Thus, while the Museum of the Victims of Communism will teach you an important part of the history of communism, one should bear in mind that it is indeed only a part.