Museum of the Workers’ Movement in the 21st century

The objective of the project is to open up and present selected materials of the Museum of the Workers' Movement collection and other relevant collections in the context of the 21st century, and to use them for educative purposes. The Museum of the Workers' Movement contains the collections of three period-engaged museums (Klement Gottwald Museum, V. I. Lenin Museum ad Julius Fučík Museum) which include materials of various character. These collections were created upon the power ideology to present the left-wing and socialist movement during the era of state socialism. The purpose of the project is to select representative items from the collection and introduce them to the general public, including an educative application which will enable the collection to be used for teaching in primary and secondary schools. Further, an environment and methodical devices will be prepared for involving both domestic and foreign memory and research institutions in the project, forming the basis for a follow-up research.
The unique material of the original collections, taken by the National Museum into its keeping in 2014–2016, shall be presented mainly through an information portal entitled Encyclopaedia of the Museum of the Workers' Movement, which will include a specialist map and an educational application, and also through expert publication outputs and follow-up experts’ activities (such as articles and workshops), which will open crucial topics to public discussion and other ways of confronting the given issue.
The project will also pursue several secondary objectives: it will deal, for example, with the Julius Fučík legend in connection with the fate of a valuable manuscript of Reports Written under the Noose and its restoration, for which a separate, smaller-scale exhibition will be organised, and with the presentation of archive materials relating to the first communist president Klement Gottwald. In the end, the project will offer a completing exhibition entitled, Museum of the Workers' Movement for the 21st Century.

Project name: Museum of the Workers' Movement in the 21st century. Dealing with a museum collection from the era of state socialism and ways of using it for the needs of experts and the general public
Code: DG18P02OVV045
Duration: 2018–2022
Agency: NAKI II. (Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic)
Project type: consortial (NM as the principal investigator)
NM’s investigator: Mgr. Tomáš Kavka, Ph.D.
Other participants: Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Mgr. Čeněk Pýcha)

Anticipated results/outputs:
- Specialised map with expert content (Nmap)
- Software (R)
- Two exhibitions (E) with expert catalogue (B)
- Expert book (B)
- Eight peer-reviewed expert articles (J)
- Three expert public databases (S)- audio-visual wok (A)