From revolution to souvenirs
The selling of communism across Central and Eastern Europe reveals more than the region’s ingenuity in repurposing its past – it exposes how memory itself has become a currency in the post-socialist era. This marketplace of memory is not merely a tourist trend – it is a mirror of broader cultural transformations.
December 8, 2025 -
Jovana Janinovic
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Hot TopicsIssue 6 2025Magazine
On the outskirts of Budapest, tourists pose for Instagram among the toppled Lenin statues in Memento Park – a surreal open-air museum of socialism, where communist-era monuments are displaced, mismatched, and taken off their pedestals. In Belgrade’s railway station, Playboy organizes its birthday party in Tito’s Blue Train, the rolling symbol of communist Yugoslavia, while in the Brijuni national park in Croatia, Russian oligarchs rent Tito’s villas for their luxury coastal holidays.
Across Central and Eastern Europe, the remnants of communism have been reborn as tourist attractions, fashion backdrops, and party venues. The cover of Polish Vogue juxtaposes fashion models with the modernist aesthetics of the infamous Palace of Culture, resulting in clashes of style, representation and identity of communist and capitalist symbols. At Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, fake soldiers charge ten euros for a fake passport stamp, surrounded by real fragments of the Berlin Wall and souvenir shops stuffed with hammer-and-sickle magnets.
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