The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War offers priceless insight into how people lived under communism, and how they came to challenge it. Some items in the museum recall the overstuffed apartments of Muscovites, replete with ceramic plates celebrating the 1980 Moscow Olympics and multivolume editions of the writings of everyone from Karl Marx to Jack London. Other items speak about the dramatic changes of the late 1980s. Take, for instance, an eight-inch plaster bust of Vladimir Lenin mass-produced in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s. What makes this particular bust unusual is the paint job it received—in neon pink and turquoise—during protests against the Communist regime in the fall of 1989. Lenin’s figure had gone from being a ubiquitous part of East German everyday life to being a symbol of protest.

A review of the museum from a Hungarian website.