Welcome to Stalin World!
This is a remarkable open-air museum in Lithuania that reminds people about the Soviet gulags
Grutas Park is a sculpture park in woodlands deep in the Lithuanian countryside. It is otherwise known as Stalin World, as though it were Lithuania’s answer to Disney World. Perhaps it is.
The main feature of the park is the collection of dozens of statues and busts of former Communist leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Karl Marx and the founders of the Communist regime that ruled Lithuania when it was part of the Soviet Union before 1990.
Grutas Park was the brainchild of Viliumas Malinauskas, who was at various times a heavyweight wrestling champion, a Soviet-era soldier and the manager of a collective farm. After the fall of Communism he made a fortune from mushroom farming, and it was this money that led him to create Stalin World.
In 1998 he bought many of the statues and busts that now grace the park when these came up for auction having been removed from public display in various towns and cities. Some of these were enormous lumps of granite or bronze whereas others were relatively small. Many had been damaged when being toppled from their previous places of honour.