Grūtas Park

Where it sits. Grūtas Park occupies about twenty hectares of pine forest and marshy ground near the village of Grūtas, some eight kilometres east of the spa town of Druskininkai in southern Lithuania and roughly 130 kilometres from Vilnius. The setting is deliberate: a wooded site with boardwalks, watchtowers and barbed wire along the perimeter, evoking the appearance of a deportation camp, through which visitors walk between the exhibits. It is known formally as Grūto parkas and unofficially, almost universally in English-language coverage, as Stalin World.

What it contains. The collection consists of the Soviet monumental sculpture that stood in Lithuanian town squares until independence: 86 statues by 46 sculptors, together with reliefs, busts, plaques and a large quantity of propaganda material, posters, paintings and everyday objects held in indoor exhibition buildings. Lenin appears repeatedly, including the figure removed from Lukiškės Square in central Vilnius. So do Stalin, Marx, Engels, Dzerzhinsky, and the Lithuanian communists Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas and Zigmas Angarietis. The statues were pulled down in 1990 and 1991 in the weeks and months around the restoration of Lithuanian independence, and then sat in municipal yards and storage depots with no agreed fate.

How it came to exist. The park was created by Viliumas Malinauskas, a businessman who had made a fortune in mushroom canning, and it opened on 1 April 2001. He won the right to take custody of the state-owned sculptures and assembled them on his own land at his own expense. The project was contested from the beginning. Deportees, partisans and their families argued that presenting the imagery of a regime that killed and exiled tens of thousands of Lithuanians in a park setting risked turning it into entertainment; supporters argued that destroying the statues would have erased evidence, and that context, not demolition, was the responsible answer. In 2001 the park and its founder were awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, a distinction that captures the ambivalence exactly.

How it handles its subject. The tone is not reverent and not quite satirical. Loudspeakers play Soviet anthems along the paths. The indoor galleries present socialist realist painting and archive material with captions that are informational rather than ironic. A café serves dishes of the period, and there is a playground fitted with Soviet-era equipment and a small animal enclosure, additions that draw most of the criticism and most of the family visitors. The overall effect on a wet autumn afternoon, walking a boardwalk between watchtowers with a bronze Lenin looming out of the pines, is considerably more unsettling than the theme-park framing suggests.

On screen, and why it is not a film location. Grūtas Park has no significant filming credit, and it would be wrong to sell it as one. Its relevance to screen tourism is different: it is the place where the physical iconography of the Soviet century is stored, and it has become a natural companion visit for travellers drawn to Lithuania by Chernobyl, whose Pripyat was filmed in the Vilnius district of Fabijoniškės and whose plant interiors were shot at Ignalina. The statues here are the same visual vocabulary the series reconstructed from scratch. Seeing the originals at close range, corroded, oversized and stripped of their squares, does something no set dressing can.

Practical detail. The park charges an entrance fee, is open every day of the year, and the outdoor route takes between one and two hours at a normal pace with the indoor exhibitions adding more. Paths are boardwalk and gravel and can be soft after rain; the terrain is flat but not uniformly firm. Signage is in Lithuanian and English. Photography is permitted throughout. The indoor buildings hold the more disturbing material: minutes of party meetings, school textbooks, deportation records and the visual apparatus of a state that governed Lithuania for half a century.

Getting there and combining it. Druskininkai is the obvious base, reachable from Vilnius by bus in about two hours, and the park is a short taxi ride or a signposted drive from the town. Druskininkai itself is a nineteenth-century mineral spa on the Nemunas river, with sanatoria, a modern water park and an indoor ski slope, and it fills with Lithuanian and Polish visitors in summer. The Dzūkija National Park nearby preserves pine forest, sand dunes and villages with a long tradition of mushroom gathering, which is where the park's founder made the money that paid for the statues in the first place. Anyone travelling on from here can reach Vilnius, the Ignalina plant and the Fabijoniškės estates within a single long day, which together form the most complete circuit of Soviet-era Lithuania available to a visitor.