On paper, Grutas Park in southern Lithuania is not an entirely unusual place for a country that has been subjected to a brutal dictatorship for decades. It preserves dozens of statues of the Soviet regime: giant depictions of Lenin, Stalin, Karl Marx and the leaders of the Soviet Union that once stood in the squares of Lithuanian cities and were demolished or removed after the country’s independence in 1991.
Sites housing the statues of fallen dictatorships can be found in different parts of the world. Staying with the Soviet theme, there is a similar park in Hungary, in Budapest. In Taiwan, on the other hand, there is a park that houses hundreds of statues of a single person, the dictator Chiang Kaishek, who ruled the island with extreme harshness between 1949 and 1975. However, Grutas Park has some peculiarities that make it unique.
While such places are usually built through public initiative, Grutas Park came into being through the will of a private entrepreneur, Viliumas Malinauskas, who got rich thanks to the mushroom trade in the 90s (in Lithuania he is still known as “the king of mushrooms”). Malinauskas used his own funds to purchase the land and was personally involved in salvaging the statues of Soviet leaders, which had been demolished in the 1990s and were mostly in basements or local warehouses.
The entrance to the park of Grutas (Il Post)
Opened in 2001, Grutas Park immediately caused a great deal of controversy: the main reason is that instead of creating a place for meditation and remembrance, Malinauskas built a kind of Sovietstyle amusement park, so much so that it was defined by the media as “Stalinland” or “Leninland”.
The main attraction of Grutas are obviously the statues of the Soviet leaders: along a path laid out in a forest, often secluded in small clearings surrounded by trees, they are quite majestic. By far the most represented figure is Lenin, followed by Stalin. There are also various more or less famous figures of communist mythology, such as soldiers and peasants, many leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party and the occasional Karl Marx. The statues as a whole are impressive and the arrangement in the forest makes them impressive.
A statue of Stalin (The Post)
Along the way some wooden buildings house a kind of Soviet art gallery with portraits of great leaders, a communist library with a conference room and a collection of relics from the occupation of Lithuania, all quite dusty.
In the West, the debate over what to do with controversial statues is fairly new. It began in the United States when, following the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, many activists asked that monuments to historical figures who fought on the Southern Front be removed from American cities, d Civil War. The issue then spread to the United Kingdom and some other European countries such as Belgium: in these locations various controversial statues, such as that of Belgian Emperor Leopold II, one of the most brutal rulers in modern history, were gunned down by activists. Italy was only touched by these controversies, the most relevant of which concerned the statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan.
In the former Soviet states, on the other hand, there has been debate for decades about what to do with statues that represent a past that is now considered painful and undeniable. The Soviet regime was particularly active in creating recognizable iconography, both in architecture and in the figurative arts. The statues in particular were one of the most successful manifestations of this policy: the busts of Lenin multiplied throughout the Soviet Union and beyond, so that today there are some from Antarctica to Svalbard, from the United States to Emilia.
Also read: Lenin is everywhere
For this reason too, one of the hallmarks of the liberation movements in the countries of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s was iconoclasm: the peoples who liberated themselves from Soviet oppression tore down and destroyed the statues and other symbols of the old regime because it meant its freedom and claim independence.
(The post)
Relegating the remaining statues to museums or other special places was a solution adopted in many former Soviet countries. Parks like Grutas can also be found in Hungary and Poland, while in other Eastern European countries some important statues have been relocated outside of the city centre.
Many decisions were contested, and in some cases the move caused controversy and unrest: this is what happened, for example, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where the government decided in 2007 to move a famous Soviet monument to the fallen of World War II to a city center rather peripheral military cemetery. The decision sparked major protests, particularly among the city’s Russian minority: violent riots broke out for two nights, and the Estonian government even had to accept diplomatic retaliation from Russia.
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In this complicated and contradictory context, the Grutas Park fits in in a very peculiar way, precisely because it was conceived only partly as a place of memory and commemoration, but it is also perhaps above all a place of fun and entertainment.
Indeed, the park’s attractions are not limited to the statues and communist memorabilia: there is also a zoo full of animals such as kangaroos (including a white albino), bears, ostriches, emus, peacocks, camels and a wide variety of birds. Animals are not always kept in ideal conditions: cages are small and do not always seem adequate. Parrots, for example, are in a greenhouse heated with electric heaters.
A bear at Grutas Park Zoo (Il Post)
There is also a children’s playground in the main square of Grutas, also themed: the rides and games are from the years of Soviet rule and are dilapidated and half rusted. But they can still be used and add a certain charm to the structure.
The attempt to turn Soviet memorabilia into a tourist attraction borders on nostalgia in some cases, which is the main reason for criticism of Grutas Park. On the main square, near the rides, there is a stage from which music from the Soviet era is constantly broadcast: in the high season, thematic performances are held there (on the day the park opened in 2001, an imitator of Lenin was present ).
souvenir shops sell matryoshkas and small busts of Lenin and Stalin; Children who wish can take a photo behind a bound book dressed up as Soviet “pioneers”, that is, members of one of the youth leagues of the Communist Party. And the only restaurant in the whole park offers a menu called “Nostalgia” that offers typical dishes of the Soviet Union.
The hardcover behind which children can photograph themselves as pioneers of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Il Post).
Over the years, Malinauskas has been accused of wanting to make the communist past spectacular and, at worst, deliberately playing on nostalgia for the dictatorship.
Nostalgia, at least explicitly, is not the message that the organization of the park wants to convey: on the official website we read that “the aim of this exhibition is to give the Lithuanian people, visitors to the country and future generations the opportunity to to see naked Soviet ideology that has suppressed and damaged the spirit of our nation for many decades”. It is not even the impression of some visitors, who are still few at the end of March: although it is a beautiful sunny day, the temperature is close to zero and there is a strong cold wind. “We don’t feel nostalgia: we are here to see what our grandparents and parents told us,” says a young couple in front of a large portrait of former Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev.
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Nevertheless, the controversy surrounding the park has been considerable, especially in recent years: among other things, a group of former political prisoners from the Soviet era even organized a hunger strike on the occasion of the opening as a sign of protest. .
Malinauskas’ entrepreneurial spirit often made the problems worse: at one point he wanted to build a tourist train in the park, similar to the one that takes deportees to the Gulags, but the project was banned by the Ministry of Culture. Over the years, for various reasons, the controversy has gradually renewed, although lately the Park of Grutas, with its huge and impressive statues, has been viewed a little more favorably.