Welcome to Stalin World

An unlikely theme park brings Lithuania’s communist past to life. Andy Gilham visited Grūto Parkas and met its owner, Viliumas Malinauskas. Photographs by the author.

Stalin in the woods

“We do not have the right to forget!” Viliumas Malinauskas’s voice is large and booming, and somewhat indignant at the suggestion that, just possibly, a park collecting the discarded statues of Soviet icons may be in questionable taste. “History is not good or bad – history is history!”

I’m at Grūto Parkas, near the spa town of Druskininkai, close to Lithuania’s border with Belarus, and although the weather has been glorious all week, today it is grey and drizzly, which adds an extra layer of foreboding to the grim visages of Lenin, Stalin, and other heroes of the Soviet Union, displaced from town squares all over the country. Neighbouring Latvia has a sombre Museum of Occupation: 1940-1991, but Lithuania has a theme park – which may indicate some differences in the character of the two nations.

The park was created at Malinauskas’s expense, on an area of reclaimed marshland, and planted with birch trees – just to give it that special Siberian ambience. He’s one of the leading entrepreneurs of the recently independent Baltic states, and one of the richest men in Lithuania, having made his fortune cornering the mushroom market. In late summer and autumn, it’s mushroom season in Lithuania’s forests, and mushroom pickers line the roads selling their gleanings – but many sell their harvest directly to Malinauskas’ company for canning and export. Recently, he’s been moving into snail farming, exporting to France, but the barbed wire-encircled Grūto Parkas – known to some of the more cynical locals as “Stalin World” – represents a rather more radical diversification.

Deportation wagons at the park entrance, through the barbed wire

Malinauskas’ assistant and interpreter, Virginija – if he speaks English at all, he didn’t in my presence – gives me the low-down on his empire: “500 to 700 employees, mushrooms, snails and berries, turnover of 8 million Litas [about £1.6m]…” she rattles off. She’s done this before. The park is now one of Lithuania’s top tourist destinations, with over 200,000 visitors per year. Today, thanks to the drizzly weather, it’s not too busy, although a coach party of middle-aged Germans arrives as I’m leaving, and some Lithuanian families are inspecting the train carriage just inside the entrance gate – not much more than a cattle truck, it’s one of those once used to deport dissident Lithuanians to Siberia.

There are some 87 statues in the park, recovered from around the country, and rescued from the scrap heap after being torn down in 1991’s independence demonstrations. Possibly the pride of the park is the massive figure of Lenin that used to stand in Lukiškių Square – formerly Lenin Square, naturally – in Vilnius, and familiar around the world from television footage at the time. (You can still see the joins in his knees where he’s been mended.) Others are of Stalin, Marx, and the Lithuanian-educated founder of the Cheka (which became the KGB), Felix Dzerzhinsky. Taken from their town square plinths, relocated to the woodland, they’re one step removed from their ideology; a seated Lenin, who would once have seemed an Orwellian big brother, now seems to be having a relaxing day out in the country. The bust of Stalin, which once held court outside Vilnius’s railway station, seems almost abstract, and not entirely out of place in its new home. It’s almost as if they’ve retired from politics.

Lenin just read a book on Marx

But the lesser-known figures are just as interesting – executed communist dissidents from the early 1900’s, some with quiffs to make Elvis blanch, as well as forgotten apparatchiks from the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Each statue has an informative notice explaining, in Lithuanian, Russian and English, not only who it represents, but also the sculptor, and where it used to stand – maybe Lithuania’s second city, Kaunas, or the coastal resort of Klaipeda. In the case of the Vilnius Lenin, there’s also a photograph of him falling in a cloud of dust.

A quiff to be proud of

A lecture theatre and library display yet more propaganda, this time in the form of paintings and posters: the former consisting largely of idealised, and rather dull, portrayals of rural life, but the latter often showing a striking modernist design sense.

Soviet poster art

So, is the park an art gallery, or a history lesson? Well, a bit of both, it would seem. Malinauskas’ own father, he tells me, was deported to Siberia for 10 years, and although this was clearly traumatic, he does seem to use the fact to deflect criticism of profiteering from past atrocities.

But while walking around the park, as uplifting Soviet melodies are played over the concentration-camp style loudspeaker system, I notice one sixtyish chap smiling and humming along. Talking to other Lithuanians, there is certainly something akin to the “ostalgia” that exists in the former East Germany; in spite of the deportations and the general restrictions on freedom, many people were basically doing fine under the Soviet Union, with its free education and healthcare and artificially low rents, and those people found times very hard in the early days of independence as unemployment and rents rocketed. “Under the Soviet Union, we were not allowed to travel. Now we can travel, but we have no money to travel!” I was told by one lady.

And it’s certainly true that even to a Westerner, the Soviet chic - not just of the statues, but in the exhibits of communist paintings and posters - does exert a certain allure. The gift shop will sell you T-shirts, and all manner of paraphernalia, bearing the likeness of Lenin, or the letters “CCCP”. Even the park’s logo adapts the hammer and sickle to form the letter “G” of “Grūto”.

The gift shop. I bought the black t-shirt.

I get the distinct impression, though, that although Malinauskas clearly (and shrewdly) courts controversy, he’s rather weary of discussing it; and when asked, changes the subject to the rival Szoborpark statue park recently opened in Hungary. “There is a park in Budapest, but they only have 30 statues, and you see them all at once. And it is very anti-Russian people. This park is not anti the Russian people, but against an ideology, not a nation. We do not present emotions, just facts. Tears will not lead anywhere!”

And at that point, I sense the interview is at an end. I didn’t get the chance to ask about the now-abandoned plans to build a train line from Vilnius using replicas of the old train cars, so that visitors could enjoy the full “deportation to Siberia” experience.

Just before the clouds burst, Malinauskas dashes outside and, clearly enjoying the fruits of capitalism, does a quick circuit of the lawn on his quad bike.