Malinauskas refers to his new creation as the “Information Center and Museum of Grutas Park,” but others already have a catchier name: Stalinworld. Once it’s up and running, the price tag for each dose of totalitarian deja vu will be $1.25, But Malinauskas isn’t in it for the money. “All traces of the Soviet regime are disappearing, even from our history books. It’s easy to forget,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I don’t want future schoolchildren to think life was better under Stalin or Lenin.” As in many former Soviet states, Lithuania’s transition to democracy has meant a rough decade of economic uncertainty.
Historians say that up to 456,000 people–one out of every three adults in Lithuania at the time–were imprisoned, deported or executed after the Red Army first invaded the country in 1940. An estimated 60,000 survivors are still living in Lithuania today. But discussing the gulag was banned during the Soviet years, and even after independence in 1991 few former victims were eager to relive the horrors. Among them: Malinauskas’s own father, who spent 10 years surviving on grain husks in Siberian camps. “He didn’t like to talk about what happened,” says Malinauskas.
But his son certainly does. Blocked from advancing along the communist career path, the 59-year-old Malinauskas–former wrestling champion, collective-farm worker and present-day produce tycoon (known locally as the Mushroom King)–is getting vicarious revenge. He irreverently pats the head of a one-ton white marble Lenin. “If I had done this back then, I would have disappeared the next day.”
It’s that sort of remark that has critics accusing Malinauskas of trivializing the past. “Imagine that you have a village where the women have been raped and the men all disappear,” said Leonas Kerosierus, the leader of protest group called Labora that is trying to block the park’s construction. “Then 10 or 15 years later this Malinauskas comes along and says he’s going to build a park to honor the criminals who did it.” Kerosierus argues that the neatly tended grounds of the park will only fuel nostalgia for simpler times. Malinauskas, he says, “is our Judas Iscariot.”
Gulag survivor Monica Karloniene, 69, disagrees. Karloniene still flinches at the memory of how she was separated from her family in 1948 and crammed into a cattle car for the trip east to Siberia. “I was 16 and had nothing,” she says. But she’s all for Stalinworld. Her daughter, after all, has just got a job in the park. And in an area of Lithuania where unemployment is running at 30 percent, that’s no small achievement.
