Victims of Communism Museum to Open in Washington DC in 2021

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is set to open a new museum in Washington DC in 2021.

The Victims of Communism Museum will likely open for its first phase around mid-2021. It will be located at 900 15th St. NW.

The museum is funded entirely by donors, according to foundation executive director Marion Smith. It will host events and offer exhibits that incorporate technology. The exhibits will explain the history and legacy of communism and memorialize its victims. Many historians estimate the number of victims worldwide to be approximately 100 million.

“It’s been a longstanding goal of our foundation and supporters to have a museum in Washington, D.C., with permanent and temporary exhibits that tell the many stories of some 40 nations that have been ruled by a single-party communist dictatorship in the last 100-plus years,” Smith said. “On the communism, Marxist angle, we have China, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, which are still ruled by single-party communist dictatorships.”

Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed legislation in 1993—two years after the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War—to create the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation has seen a considerable increase in donations over the past few years, hauling in nearly $13 million in 2018 after $2.3 million in 2017 and approximately $665,000 in 2016.

This is a positive development. Hopefully this helps spur more widespread reflection on the errors and crimes of communism, in order that we avoid sliding into similar errors and crimes ourselves.