Travel news around the world: Introducing Stalinworld-- Lithuania's Communist Theme Park

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

Introducing Stalinworld-- Lithuania's Communist Theme Park

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The park playground intermingled with rusting artillery become indiscriminate playthings for the younger visitors. The strange assortment of animals in the small zoo includes no less than a dozen species of pigeon, and three black bears in a pen the size of your old dorm room. A child bounces on Lenin’s head. This is the scene at Grūtas Parkas-- Lithuania’s bizarre communist theme park.

Dark tourism is a phenomenon where tourists visit places associated with suffering, and it’s growing in popularity. Each year over 1.4 million people visit Auschwitz the 9/11 memorial sees over 5 million, and Bran Castle home of Vlad the Impaler aka Dracula sees 300,000

So it should be no surprise that someone has found a way to profit off the nostalgia and scars of the Soviet Union. Viliumas Malinauskas, a Lithuanian mushroom tycoon, has done just that with Grūtas Parkas creating a strange theme park unofficially nicknamed-- Stalinworld. From it’s opening the park ignited controversy with locals arguing that it profited from authorities suffered by a Soviet occupation.

The statue park is filled with hundreds of Soviet statues, he rents from the Lithuanian government who might otherwise dispose of them or sell to collectors abroad. Grūtas has gained the unlikely comparison to a Communist Disneyland.

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Landscaped in the style of a gulag with Russian dialogue coming out of hidden speakers from its realistic guard towers with uniformed mannequins looming over the visitors. Every detail has been executed; even the ice cream vendor wears a pressed communist era workers uniform. Grūtas Parkas is as much a sculpture park as a psychological experiment. People watching, shows a generational divide in the ways its visitors interact with the statues. The younger the visitor the more likely they are to take Stalin selfies.

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