For Your Entertainment: Soviet Era "Theme Parks"

The Guardian: Feeling nostalgic for the good old Soviet Union? Then head to Lithuania, where several theme parks let visitors feel exactly what it was like – right down to scary, abusive guards.

I can't say I wasn't warned: I had just signed a health and safety waiver that included the following clause: "In case of disobedience participants may receive psychological or physical punishments." This is “1984: Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker,” a three-hour long, quasi-theatrical experience in a genuine Soviet bunker in the middle of the Lithuanian forest. While most former Soviet republics have let their memories of the period fade into red mist, 20 years since the Russian tanks rolled out, Lithuania is confronting its communist past head-on.

An hour earlier, Ruta Vanagaite, the creator of the Soviet Bunker, was setting the mood. "Someone always faints – our record is five people fainting in one show," she explained matter-of-factly, re-assuring me that my translator will have smelling salts handy. "But be sure to answer the guards' questions promptly and clearly.

We stand to attention for the Soviet anthem and hoisting of the red flag, and then down we go, into the freezing-cold bunker.  For three hours, we are force-marched through icy, virtually pitch-black corridors, barked at (by canine and human alike), humiliated, interrogated, forced to sign false confessions to imagined crimes, shown propaganda, and taught to prepare for a nuclear attack by the imperialist pigs. Vanagaite says: "It's very easy to break people's will – once you are down there, six metres underground, you feel like you can't get out."

Less theatrical, but equally harrowing, is the” Museum of Genocide Victims,” housed in a former KGB prison in central Vilnius where hundreds were tortured and killed. The exercise yard is adorned with poignant children's paintings in response to school trips here. "We encourage them to imagine what it was like," says Remigija Paldauskaite, herself only five years old when the Berlin Wall fell. "The best way to learn it is to feel it." She mimes a bored child flicking through a text book. "It's a better way than history lessons."

The final, stunning plank in the trinity of Lithuanian exercises in Soviet memory is Grutas Park, known slightly glibly to some as "Stalin's World". It is not exactly a theme park (though there is a playground, and a zoo featuring llamas and bears), but a massive outdoor collection of the country's Soviet-era statues, as well as log cabins containing thousands of other exhibits. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, this macabre oasis of socialist realism was built on snail money (the owner Viliumas Malinauskas is a wealthy snail and mushroom farmer), and is situated deep in the tranquil Lithuanian forest. It is a surreal experience, walking for a mile through the tiny village of Grutas, past a solitary fisherman sitting by a lake, to discover a world where Stalin stands quietly gathering cobwebs in a clearing, and Marx and Engels peek out from the shadows.

There are inevitable differences of opinion about how best to commemorate the Soviet occupation; Grutas Park in particular has attracted criticism for creating a shrine to communism, rather than a mausoleum for it. Vanagaite is dismissive of its softer approach: "What we are doing is the opposite of Grutas Park – you cannot buy anything here, this is not about nostalgia." She suggests that the extensive gift shop and nostalgia-channelling Soviet-style cafe – featuring "Russian-style sprats" and a minimal "Nostalgija" borsch – make it a "Stalinist amusement park".

Grutas Park is unapologetic about using mockery as a weapon: on special occasions, they employ lookalikes to pose as Lenin, Stalin et al, and put on performances by young actors dressed up as Pioneers. "Now we can laugh at our Soviet past," announces the park's audio guide at one point.

Read Entire Article