Following the discovery of the mass burial at the Tuskulėnai estate, the museum employed archaeologists to search for the execution chamber where, it was thought, many of the grave’s victims had initially been killed. Following the advice of former prison guards, it was discovered at a location marked as ‘kitchen’ on KGB maps, and was excavated in 1998. Situated below the political prisoners’ cells, it became the centrepiece of the museum. Yet the execution chamber was not reconstructed to appear as it might have looked in the 1950s, in a fashion similar to the rest of the building where prison cells were filled with narrow beds and the accoutrements of a Stalinist‐era prison. Rather, it was displayed as a present‐day archaeological dig in progress, with the credentials of forensic science laid out for the visitor to observe. A glass floor was placed a foot above ground level. Visitors could stand on this and regard the dug earth below, on which objects such as a pair of glasses and a small piece of barbed wire were placed as if they had just been uncovered. Visitors were also directed towards a newly excavated drain where, it was claimed, the blood from executed victims flowed away, and to bullet holes in the wall. The display appeared to freeze the moment of revelation when the violence and brutality of the Communist system were finally revealed by archaeologists.
The chamber was in fact artifice masquerading as naturalism. The objects scattered on its floor had not been found there, but rather had been collected from the Tuskulėnai grave and had been then professionally arranged to mimic the popularly understood representation of an archaeological dig. The appeal to the moment of scientific discovery assured viewers that they were gaining an unmediated experience of terror. The visitor was simply being provided with the evidence of atrocity which the Communists had tried to hide and the museum simply uncovered and left untouched. Yet these devices were as much about concealment as they were about revelation: they distracted the audience from the notion that it had been an ideological decision to excavate, reconstruct, and display the Communist prison but not the Fascist era one. An awareness of the choice that had been made to reconstruct one apparatus of terror but not another would have had the capacity to erase the sense of authenticity that made the museum’s stories of martyrdom so powerful. Thus forensic archaeology played a central role in the creation of new anti‐Communist histories; it provided the powerful sense of an unmediated revelation of criminality and terror which could be utilized to tell the stories of national suffering that were at the heart of their new visions for national identity, whilst justifying the exclusion of those other stories which threatened the ascendancy of these accounts in post‐Communist collective memory.
(Emphasis added.)
The author of this paper is a raging lib, but… I recommend that everybody here read it at least once to truly grasp how miserably the anticommunists failed to confirm their meme ideology.
They carelessly put Axis collaborators and innocents in the same baskets (regardless of who executed them!), misrepresented a few natural deaths as executions, ignored the victims of anticommunists, turned garbage dumps and sewers into memorial sites, treated absences of evidence as evidence of absence, and in Romania’s case, some visitors tried to communicate with the dead.
Read the paper if you don’t believe me; it’s only 25 pages long anyway.
Note: I have read that the anticommies did similar with a lot of former GDR sites, like ‘reconstructing’ a torture chamber based on nothing but a report from somebody who looked at it once while walking past it; the site turned out to be a storage closet (or something else equally harmless). I read that they also placed a railway carriage in front of a prison that had never been connected to any railway line, just to liken the prison to a concentration camp. I have not investigated these claims myself, but they sound quite plausible.