Glitzy new shops, fast food restaurants and trendy bars have replaced Prague's former monochrome socialist-era landscape but a museum dedicated to the country's communist past offers glimpses of the uglier times.

The Museum of Communism, which focuses on politics, history, sport and other aspects of daily life in socialist Czechoslovakia, touts itself as the first of its kind in Prague exclusively devoted to the system that dominated the country for more than four decades following World War II.

Located just off a busy shopping street and situated next to a casino and a McDonald's, the museum takes visitors on a journey that began with the February 1948 coup which ushered in the totalitarian regime and ended with the quick-fire Velvet Revolution of 1989 that toppled communism...