This first appeared in Fortean Times, FT456, April 2025.
There were more statues of Lenin than you could shake a stick at. A superfluity of statues and busts of Lenin in various scales, from life size to huge, in a line stretching into the pine forest as far as I could see. Lenin, Lenin, Lenin, or “Leninas” as he’s known in Lithuanian. The grammar of the Lithuanian language means the names of most famous people are Lithuanianised to ensure agreement of nouns by gender and case ending.
Leninas, with goat
It was a peculiar set of circumstances that brought me to the faux frontier post guard's kiosk at the entrance to Grutas Park. It was a "dark tourism" side-trip that was part of a health tourism honeymoon – I was accompanying my brand new bride, supporting her in getting a hip replacement in Lithuania. It turned out the strange tourist attraction that is Grutas Park is under ten minutes by cab from the spa where we were staying for post-op convalescence and physio in Druskininkai, an out-of-the-way health resort in the middle of a huge forest and national park in the southern end of Lithuania, not far from the Belorussian border.
The weather wasn’t conducive to the “dark tourism” vibe, though. It was a record-breakingly hot early September, so hot that I was glad to be in the shade of the pine forest. The three-kilometre loop around the site to see over 80 sculptures requires a lot of walking, it’s not for people who’ve just had their hips replaced. So I left my recuperating bride to rest in our room for an afternoon and took a cab to Grutas Park, also unofficially known as "Stalin World."
An appropriately brusque woman wearing a young pioneer’s red neckerchief took €12 off me and I entered the park. The first thing I noticed was that, alongside monuments to the heroes of the Soviet Union, there were many enclosures with rabbits, black swans, exotic geese, emus, several interesting breeds of goats, wallabies, peacocks (of which some were albinos), budgerigars, llamas, alpacas and some very friendly rheas who seemed to like having their photos taken.
Grutas Park was planned in response to a parliamentary committee set up to find a “solution” to the dumped Soviet statuary then littering Lithuania’s municipal yards and warehouses. Lithuania had enjoyed independence since the Russian Revolution of 1917, only to be annexed to the Soviet Union by force in 1940. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was welcomed here by pretty much everyone.
A few Soviet monuments had already been torn down and broken up by crowds in ’91 before local boy Villumas Malinauskas, an entrepreneur in berries and mushrooms, started urgent talks with the Ministry of Culture about a plan to save Lithuania’s antique Social Realist statuary heritage from the Soviet era at minimal expense to the state. After all, they were sculptures by Lithuanian artists, half a century’s worth of the nation’s public art.
These public sculptures had once stood in endless war cemeteries, university campuses, town squares and at prominent points in those multiple-laned, otherwise empty boulevards and “prospects” going out of town, which are now prime retail and hospitality locations.
Malinauskas said his mission was to keep memories of repression alive and bearable, which he hoped to achieve partly through “irreverence”. Humour, said Malinauskas, “helps overcome the fears of the past.” The Park opened on April Fool’s Day 2001. Soon after its opening, the Park won an Ig Nobel award.
As part of that irreverence, heroes of the Soviet Union share space with much more recent-looking “naive art” wooden sculptures of scenes from fairy tales. There’s a particularly sinister-looking encounter between Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, there’s the full cast of characters from The Great Big Enormous Turnip. Also on view is a fairytale family group including a woman clutching a snake who wears a crown. This is from perhaps Lithuania’s most famous and most-researched fairy tale, Eglė the Queen of Grass Snakes. It’s complicated, but Eglė’s family pull several scams to get her out of having to marry Žilvinas, King of the Grass Snakes, followed by a horde of snakes turning up threatening to unleash a famine. Eglė is finally coerced into marrying Žilvinas. But when she moves into his magical underwater realm, he turns out to have changed his form from that of a grass snake into that of a rather handsome human. They live there happily and have four children, until Eglė’s family brutally murder Žilvinas and Eglė turns herself and her children into trees.
Lithuania was a pagan country with many well-documented gods and goddesses right up to 1387, it’s thought that the grass snake may have once been revered as a sacred animal. This group of statues at Grutas may be a parody of the traditional wooden carvings depicting the same fairy tale at a more mainstream folklore-themed tourist attraction down the road, the Lithuanian Foresters’ Union’s Forest Echo Museum.
There were no agit-prop shows on at the little open air theatre at Grutas Park when I was there on a Monday, while the loudspeakers that used to play Soviet “patriotic” songs were silent. (I’m told these are used only for anniversary celebrations or commemorations of now defunct festivals from the Soviet-era calendar.) The original plan was to bring customers to the gate in cattle trucks pulled by a Soviet-era locomotive, like prisoners being bought to the gulags, but the “inappropriate” klaxon sounded at the Minister of Culture and the proposal was dropped.
Parked at the entrance, though, there’s a black Soviet freight loco with a red star on the front and a couple of freight wagons, said to be from period of the “deportations” – many Lithuanians were sent to the gulags when the Soviet drove the Germans out of Lithuania and re-occupied it at the end of World War Two. And was the heavy use of barbed wire and the high fence of the enclosure at the edge of the Park mimicking the perimeter fence around a Soviet gulag, or was it just to stop particularly escape-prone exotic goats getting out?
While there seems to have been an endless demand for “Leninas” statuary, Grutas Park also has a statue of “K. Marksas” (Karl Marx) who appears to rise out of his square plinth. There's also a double bust of Marx and Engels. And there are endless mourning war widows and soldiers at attention with bowed heads aplenty, for those many, many war cemeteries, and monuments to what was once known as the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1944, now downgraded in the signage to the "Soviet-German war".
Another figure who pops up a lot in the state-sponsored statuary of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was the impressively moustachioed Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas. He was an old-school underground Communist in the last decades of Tsarist Russia, in a Lithuanian Communist party founded a decade before the Russian one. Mickevičius-Kapsukas served in brief Soviet republics set up by the “Reds” in Lithuanian territory during the Russian Civil War, before the Poles forced these out and he went into exile in Moscow, where he was on the board of the Comintern, the Soviet Union’s operation to promote international revolution. The several statues of Mickevičius-Kapsukas at Grutas include – inevitably – one depicting him in conversation with “Leninas.”
As well as “Leninas” and Mickevičius-Kapsukas, some relatively obscure local revolutionaries, middle-ranking Soviet staff officers or bureaucrats are immortalised in stone, concrete or bronze at Grutas. Some of these were “martyred” by the firing squads of the Tsarists, or the Nazi occupiers, while others, such as Karlos Pozeja and most of the Central Committee of Comminist Party of Lithuania, met their end facing the firing squads of the nationalist authoritarian regime that ruled Lithuania from 1926 onwards, in what is now euphemistically referred to in signage as “the upheaveal” (military coup), after which independent Lithuania had its own gulags and firing squads and and locked up its cartoonists.
Some of the Lithuanians among the Soviet partisans operating behind enemy lines in “the Soviet-German War” went on to become much hated postwar Soviet enforcers in the Lithuanian SSR, which earned them immortality and a statue now in Grutas Park. Ironically, a surprisingly high proportion of these brutal Soviet enforcers of Lithuanian origin would subsequently be among the many “disappeared” who were executed Stalin’s purges. Their statues at Grutas date from a slightly later, post-Stalinist period in which these former “non-persons” were posthumously rehabilitated and elevated to the devine status of Heores of the Soviet Union.
There was one “Stalinas” statue and one large Stalin bust. These had presumably been taken out of storage – his image fell out of official favour in the 1950s. There was also a solitary statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, another local boy, a Belorussian who was active in underground Communist circles in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas in the early years of the 20th century. Dzerzhinsky went on to set up the dreaded NKVD Soviet secret police force, precursor to the KGB. His image also disappeared from public view at around the same time as Stalin’s. There’s also a Soviet statue of Victory, she’s missing an arm.
Those who have experienced harassment by over-zealous Marxist paper sellers on demos or outside Tube stations would be amused by the statue of Zigmas Angarietis, who is portrayed brandishing a copy of the early Lithuanian Communist newspaper Tiesa – which he founded.
There was a distinctly Baltic-Nordic vernacular style to many of the Soviet statues at Grutas, an Art Deco influenced Modernist look. The exception seemed to be statues and busts of “Leninas”, all the work of sculptors with Lithuanian names, but which appeared fixed in an early 1950s or even 1930s style. This was despite many of the “Leninas” statues of Grutas dating from as recently as the 1980s, including one “Leninas” statue from 1986, when Gorbachev was already in power and enacting perestroika and glasnost.
Grutas has several statues of Marytė Melnikaitė, the female Soviet partisan who once had streets and collective farms named after her – captured and shot by the Germans aged just 20 in 1942 after just a few months as a guerrilla. The somewhat ranty signs at Grutas now view the Soviet partisans operating in Lithuania as “saboteurs” stealing from the population. There certainly seems to have been little enthusiasm for the Soviet partisans among Lithuania’s population, given their agenda, which was basically the re-conquest of Lithuania and its forcible re-incorpation into the USSR.
Local Soviet partisans like Melnikaitė fought in a complex, many-cornered guerrilla war between German army and SS death squads and their Lithuanian collaborators, the Polish Home Army, the nationalist Lithuanian Territorial Defence Force and also random gangs of bandits taking advantage of the chaos.
The souvenir shop selling Soviet wooden toys and porcelain Lenin busts was closed when I visited on a Monday, perhaps as part of a “living history” re-enactment of Soviet-style customer service. There was a Soviet "militia" (police) car with hammer and sickle emblems on its doors, a Muscovite car in that kind of dull orange-grey colour the Soviets did so well. Also on display was a frighteningly insanitary mineral water dispensing machine of the type I remember putting a few kopeks into on the streets and squares of Moscow on a school trip there back in 1980. It had glasses that you pressed into a feeble water jet under the dispenser that was supposed to rinse them before re-use. A row of buttons allowed customers to choose from a variety of nasty, weak, sticky flavours to add to your sparkling mineral water.
Other curiosities on show include the tyre treads of a Red Army GAZ jeep and the prints of various issues of a Red Army boot, all set in concrete. There’s a bar, a done up as a hunting lodge with trophies and stuffed wildlife. One of the weirder structures on site was a building with pillars made from trees with the branches still on, display cases full of little statues of the devil, like a little local version of the Devil Museum in the city of Kaunas to the north (FT180).
Grutas is dark tourism light, not really dark at all – just really, really odd, and pleasantly so. It seems to best way to make “memories of repression… bearable” is to put them in a beautiful tranquil forest setting, throw in some exotic animals and soak the place in an atmosphere of eccentricity and memorable quirkiness.
Grutas Park, adult admission €12. Bus M-203 from Vilnius bus station to Druskininkai then Bus 2A or Bolt cab (around €6) to Grutas Park. http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/ Copyright ©️ Matt Salusbury 2024
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