‘The first private museum’ in communist Poland (60 years of the Regional Museum in Barlinek, p. 1)

The paper discusses the establishment and the first decade of the operation of a small regional museum in Western Pomerania and one of the first in the region: in Barlinek. It provides an example of an institution whose operation over the years was based on the energy of two subsequent managers. Supported merely marginally by local-government institutions, they ran and developed one of the few of the type cultural institutions in the region. From the beginning of the Barlinek institution’s operation (founded in 1961), it stood out as the ‘first private’ museum in Poland, this emphasized not merely by the local, but also national press. When running the Museum, its founder Czesław Paśnik did not stop his social and political activism, focusing mainly on heritage preservation and promotion of the regional history. The only shadow cast on this period of his activity is Paśnik’s collaboration with the Security Service, SB, however, as documents reveal, he consented to do so in order to provide financing for the Museum.