Criminal
01-21-2002, 11:27 PM
Lithuanian Builds reminder to era of Soviet hardship
By Colin McMahon
Grutas, Lithuania - Gruto Park is full of historical memorabilia, but it is no museum. Set on a placid lake, amid forests of birch and pine and fir with a children's playground and a petting zoo. Its no vacation resort. Gruto Park is well, Gruto Park does not seem quite sure what itis. Officially, the place is called Soviet Sculpture Garden at Gruto Park. But most everyone knows it as "Stalin World".
At the park's physical heart is an imposing aray of Soviet-era monuments collected from throughout the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania. What stands at Gruto Park's philosophical and emotional heart is hard to say.
Bronze and marble Stalins and Lenins share space with lesser figures from Lithuania's communist past. Barbed wire fencing and guard towers ring the park to call to mind the Soviet gulag. Statues also honor the red army, the same force of what today's Lithuanians call "the occupation".
Park has an odd mix.
The park is promoted as a tourist attraction, a stop on the cultural swing across Lithuania. But Stalin world seems as much a source of fun and profit for an eccentric if affible millionaire as it does a sincere effort to educate people about the horrors of the Soviet era, which came to an end in 1991.
The park is intriguing not only because it is odd. It also shows the difficutlties faced by any effort in the former Soviet Uniton to explore a past so recent and so painful.
Gruto Park is the controversial brainchild of Viliumas Malinauskas, a Lithuanian mushroom magnate and former wrestling champion. His motivation for building the place has a familiar ring.
"We don't want people to forget who Stalin, Lenin and Hitler were", said Malinauskas, whose father was among the more than 300,000 Lithuanians deported to Soviet labor camps after World War II. "What you forget quickly, comes back quickly."
Like moar Lithuanian deportees, Malinauskas' father survived the gulag and returned home after Stalin's death. But tens of thousands of others, including a Malinauskas uncle never made it back. Thousands were presumed killed before ever reaching Siberia.
"While all this was going on behind the iron curtain, especially during Stalin's time, people did not know about it," Malinauskas said. "We lived in fear. Even we could not know what was going on.
"Now I remember how it was in Soviet times, but my grandchildren do not. We cannot delete that time from our history".
Trivializing the past?
Critics accuse Malinauskas of trivializing that bitter period.
"Immagine yourself a resident in a small villiage and someone came and attacked your villiage, killed your brother and raped your daughter," said Leonas Kelrosierius, a veteran of Lithuania's independence movement. Would you allow your neighbor to build a park for these executioners and rapists or make money off of their crimes?
The criticism is not limited to Lithuania. In October, a group of Nobel Prize winners bestowed on Malinauskas an "Ig-Noble Prize" It aims to call attention to those whose efforts "cannot or should not be reproduced."
If Malinauskas was offended by the prize he masks it well. Not only is the Ig Nobel plaque on display in a giant conference room outside his offices at Gruto Park, Malinauskas even went to Boston to recieve the award.
"The prize gave me a chance to go to America and see how they live there," Malinauskas, who is trying to break into the US Market with his Mushroom Ragu, imported by Food Depot International of Vernon Hills.
Malinauskas said he "didn't like" the United States. "You have only one God there: The dollar."
The biusinessman may be a bear of a man, but lovable is not the image he projects. On a blustery winter day with the temperature near zero and a snow starting to fall, Malinauskas walks the grounds in a sweater and a blazer.
A man of the land and a former head of a Soviet-era collective farm, he peers down at visitors with country suspician. And when he offers wiskey to shake off the cold, its more of an order than a suggestion.
The park's domestic critics have felt Malinauskas' sting.
Early into the tour of Gruto Park, as vistiors have moved past the Red Army Soldier built by Nazi German prisoners of war and toward a kind of Walk of Shame featuring Marz and Lenin and Stalin they come upon a half dozen wooden states.
These, the smiling guid explains, re current Lithuanian cultural and political figures who fought efforts to build the park.
The guide, who can lead people in Lithuanian, Russian or English, peppers her presentatin with light anecdotes and heavy political sermons. The style mimics the scripted, stilted style perfected by Intourist guids during the Soviet era. Yet this does not appear to be ironic.
Capitalistic ironies
In fact, irony at Gruto Park is delivered with enough ham handedness that even the thickest Soviet appartchik from Minsk would get it. Like the bitg red sign welcomming guests and proclaiming "Happy New Year Comrades!"
Some visitors do find Gruto Park moving. Display boards in a little library built to resemble an old Soviet House of Culture do a good job of recalling the horrors that Stalin's policies of murder and deportation inflicted on so many Lithuanian families.
But the effect of the monuments and the displays is lessened by the whole kitchy tone of Stalin World. After visitors have read about what a blookthirsty tyrant Stalin was, they can pop over to the gift shop and pick up a vodka tumbler with his likeness on it.
Malinauskas makes no appologies. Gruto Park is no charitable institution nor worse, a state-sanction museum. He says the proof of Stalin World's success is the 200,000 visitors from Lithuania and several foreign nations, and the park has been open officially for less than a year.
THis encourages his view tha Gruto Park will return the $4 million that he and other investors paid to open it. Stalin World will not be in the red forever, Malinauskas said.
From the Chicago Tribune.
By Colin McMahon
Grutas, Lithuania - Gruto Park is full of historical memorabilia, but it is no museum. Set on a placid lake, amid forests of birch and pine and fir with a children's playground and a petting zoo. Its no vacation resort. Gruto Park is well, Gruto Park does not seem quite sure what itis. Officially, the place is called Soviet Sculpture Garden at Gruto Park. But most everyone knows it as "Stalin World".
At the park's physical heart is an imposing aray of Soviet-era monuments collected from throughout the former Soviet Republic of Lithuania. What stands at Gruto Park's philosophical and emotional heart is hard to say.
Bronze and marble Stalins and Lenins share space with lesser figures from Lithuania's communist past. Barbed wire fencing and guard towers ring the park to call to mind the Soviet gulag. Statues also honor the red army, the same force of what today's Lithuanians call "the occupation".
Park has an odd mix.
The park is promoted as a tourist attraction, a stop on the cultural swing across Lithuania. But Stalin world seems as much a source of fun and profit for an eccentric if affible millionaire as it does a sincere effort to educate people about the horrors of the Soviet era, which came to an end in 1991.
The park is intriguing not only because it is odd. It also shows the difficutlties faced by any effort in the former Soviet Uniton to explore a past so recent and so painful.
Gruto Park is the controversial brainchild of Viliumas Malinauskas, a Lithuanian mushroom magnate and former wrestling champion. His motivation for building the place has a familiar ring.
"We don't want people to forget who Stalin, Lenin and Hitler were", said Malinauskas, whose father was among the more than 300,000 Lithuanians deported to Soviet labor camps after World War II. "What you forget quickly, comes back quickly."
Like moar Lithuanian deportees, Malinauskas' father survived the gulag and returned home after Stalin's death. But tens of thousands of others, including a Malinauskas uncle never made it back. Thousands were presumed killed before ever reaching Siberia.
"While all this was going on behind the iron curtain, especially during Stalin's time, people did not know about it," Malinauskas said. "We lived in fear. Even we could not know what was going on.
"Now I remember how it was in Soviet times, but my grandchildren do not. We cannot delete that time from our history".
Trivializing the past?
Critics accuse Malinauskas of trivializing that bitter period.
"Immagine yourself a resident in a small villiage and someone came and attacked your villiage, killed your brother and raped your daughter," said Leonas Kelrosierius, a veteran of Lithuania's independence movement. Would you allow your neighbor to build a park for these executioners and rapists or make money off of their crimes?
The criticism is not limited to Lithuania. In October, a group of Nobel Prize winners bestowed on Malinauskas an "Ig-Noble Prize" It aims to call attention to those whose efforts "cannot or should not be reproduced."
If Malinauskas was offended by the prize he masks it well. Not only is the Ig Nobel plaque on display in a giant conference room outside his offices at Gruto Park, Malinauskas even went to Boston to recieve the award.
"The prize gave me a chance to go to America and see how they live there," Malinauskas, who is trying to break into the US Market with his Mushroom Ragu, imported by Food Depot International of Vernon Hills.
Malinauskas said he "didn't like" the United States. "You have only one God there: The dollar."
The biusinessman may be a bear of a man, but lovable is not the image he projects. On a blustery winter day with the temperature near zero and a snow starting to fall, Malinauskas walks the grounds in a sweater and a blazer.
A man of the land and a former head of a Soviet-era collective farm, he peers down at visitors with country suspician. And when he offers wiskey to shake off the cold, its more of an order than a suggestion.
The park's domestic critics have felt Malinauskas' sting.
Early into the tour of Gruto Park, as vistiors have moved past the Red Army Soldier built by Nazi German prisoners of war and toward a kind of Walk of Shame featuring Marz and Lenin and Stalin they come upon a half dozen wooden states.
These, the smiling guid explains, re current Lithuanian cultural and political figures who fought efforts to build the park.
The guide, who can lead people in Lithuanian, Russian or English, peppers her presentatin with light anecdotes and heavy political sermons. The style mimics the scripted, stilted style perfected by Intourist guids during the Soviet era. Yet this does not appear to be ironic.
Capitalistic ironies
In fact, irony at Gruto Park is delivered with enough ham handedness that even the thickest Soviet appartchik from Minsk would get it. Like the bitg red sign welcomming guests and proclaiming "Happy New Year Comrades!"
Some visitors do find Gruto Park moving. Display boards in a little library built to resemble an old Soviet House of Culture do a good job of recalling the horrors that Stalin's policies of murder and deportation inflicted on so many Lithuanian families.
But the effect of the monuments and the displays is lessened by the whole kitchy tone of Stalin World. After visitors have read about what a blookthirsty tyrant Stalin was, they can pop over to the gift shop and pick up a vodka tumbler with his likeness on it.
Malinauskas makes no appologies. Gruto Park is no charitable institution nor worse, a state-sanction museum. He says the proof of Stalin World's success is the 200,000 visitors from Lithuania and several foreign nations, and the park has been open officially for less than a year.
THis encourages his view tha Gruto Park will return the $4 million that he and other investors paid to open it. Stalin World will not be in the red forever, Malinauskas said.
From the Chicago Tribune.