Retirement park for Soviet monuments

"I refuse to discuss the park with anyone who hasn't actually been here to see it," says Viliumas Malinauskas of his statue collection in Grutas, Lithuania. Darius James Ross reports.

Everyone old enough to have watched TV during the Iron Curtain's fall will remember the defining images of that time. Berliners hacking away at the Berlin Wall and destroying the Stasi's intelligence files. The Soviet hardliners' coup against Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and the masses of Muscovites who rallied to support him. The execution of Romania's Nicolae Ceaucescu. The siege of the Vilnius television tower. And, of course, the domino-like toppling of Soviet statues in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc as each country released itself from communism's shackles.

In Lithuania, many of those statues were either reduced to rubble by mobs or sold to wealthy westerners as curiosities. The remainder sat in secure storage areas belonging to the Lithuanian government until 58 year-old Viliumas Malinauskas, the mushroom king of Druskininkai, decided to find them a home.

Historically the Druskininkai area, one-and-a-half hours south of Vilnius, has always been one of Lithuania's prettiest yet poorest regions. The sandy soil has never made it a good place for farming. But the shade provided by the abundant forests thick with red pine combined with the humidity offered by the many marshes has made it a great place for gathering Lithuanians' beloved mushrooms - not the cultivated white ones found in the local supermarket or on fast-food pizza - but chanterelles, boletus, morels, lactarius - the kind that are used in French haute cuisine.

Early in the privatization game, Malinauskas grabbed the opportunity he saw in exporting these. A long-time manager of a Soviet collective farm, he used his management skills and contacts to form Hesona, one of the first private Lithuanian food producers to export to the West. Needless to say, he struck gold. Today, 90 percent of Hesona's production leaves Lithuania. During peak periods, he has 500 purchasing points for buying mushrooms from locals. Given the labor intensity of the work, the skill required in identifying edible varieties and the unpredictability of the harvest (mushrooms spring up fastest in autumn after a rainfall followed by a warm spell), job-starved Druskininkai is the best place to be.

Malinauskas is a classic type A personality, hands-on entrepreneur, found often on Saturday afternoons in his office looking over papers and waiting by the phone. Burly and broad-shouldered, he has a steady, imposing gaze and prefers to speak rather than to listen. He dresses casually and unpretentiously. The man's hands and fingernails betray a more than managerial involvement in his operations.

"One of the workers called to say pipe 17 is leaking," announced one of his assistants.

"I'll be there shortly," he responded. He drives a dented and muddied Nissan Pathfinder with one tail light missing.

Malinauskas bought several hectares of land around the small village of Grutas outside Druskininkai several years ago with a view to building some type of resort. Meanwhile, he had also won the rights at a state auction to display Lithuania's remaining Soviet statues. The statues themselves remain state property.

"The Lithuanian government was paying 700,000 litas ($175,000) a year just for storing and safeguarding them. The other competing bidders were asking for up to 2 million litas in state funds for their museum projects. I offered to take them at no cost to the government and use my own capital," said Malinauskas. The two ideas merged into one and the sculpture park has now simply come to be known as Gruto Park.

So far he has invested 3 million litas in the project. The transportation of the statues alone cost 500,000 litas with the heaviest one, depicting Soviet partisan fighters, weighing in at 44 tons of copper. The marshy land where these statues now stand was drained and is carved up into islands separated by channels over which footbridges have been built. Malinauskas has stocked the channels with twelve tons of fish. "I never go home empty handed after fishing," he quipped.

The 50 statues of Lenin, Marx, Stalin and numerous Lithuanian communists are spread over a winding two-kilometer trail. Part of the trail involves walking through a re-created Siberian labor camp. Birches have been planted to give it a more authentic Siberian feel. Barbed wire and ominous guard towers hem in the visitor on one side. Malinauskas has more plans. By July, the towers will have guards armed with mock guns and dressed in Red army uniforms. Hidden speakers will play Soviet music and sound effects such as dogs barking and guns firing.

Bulldozers are still at work leveling a large field near the entrance to the park where Malinauskas had planned to re-create a train station. Just as Lithuanians were exiled to Siberia during and after World War II, visitors would have been herded onto cattle cars and shipped to the park's museum at the beginning of their visit.

However, the controversy Gruto Park has created among right-leaning Lithuanians has led him to shelve the project for now.

"Right now that land will become a parking lot, but I believe that after the political noise about the park settles down, Mr. Malinauskas will stick to his original train station plan," said park guide Bronius Neniskis.

The museum, still being built, will have multimedia displays including period film clips, music and slide shows. An elderly woman in a blue worker's uniform will tend an authentic burzuika, or mass-produced Soviet heating stove. For many, this was the quintessential image of life in the USSR. Also under construction nearby are a supervised petting zoo, where parents will be able to drop their little ones off while they explore, and a restaurant.

The restaurant is "under the guard" of a statue of a Red army soldier, made from a melted down German Messerschmitt fighter plane. When the soldier was toppled in 1991, a scroll containing the names of the German soldiers who worked on the statue was found. For their families this solved the riddle of what had happened to them after World War II.

Tourists walking through Gruto Park don't even need to read the plaques to know where the monuments once stood.

"Oh look, there's the Lenin in Palanga. Do you remember the bakery nearby and the wonderful smell of bread. Remember, our children would play nearby," said one woman to her husband.

People are also free to pose with the statues, or even on them, and take photos with no threat of reprisal.

"Under Soviet rule, the only pose allowed would have been a formal fig-leaf. The larger monuments were under constant police supervision. If I had done what I just did, I would have landed in jail for sure," said one man, climbing down from the Kaunas Lenin. He pointed to another monument depicting four earnest-looking anonymous comrades. "People would come to Kaunas and ask who they represented. The tongue-in-cheek answer would be: four Soviet drunks. You see, two of them are struggling to support their sodden friend while the fourth hails a cab to take him home," he said.

Malinauskas has lost patience with his critics.

"Many of them haven't even been to see Gruto Park. I offered to bus them all down here at my expense, and they refused. Now, I refuse to discuss the park with anyone who hasn't actually been here to see it," he said.

He has a binder several centimeters thick containing dozens of positive assessments of the park by myriad cultural organizations.

"Even the artist's union is behind me. Yes, the Soviet years were dark. But most of these monuments were designed and made by Lithuanian artists. They feel they have their place in history," he said. "For me it's obvious that hiding these statues from the public is only repeating the same form of lying that Lithuania experienced under Soviet rule," Malinauskas said.

Lithuania's parliament will decide whether or not the park will continue to exist on June 26. Entry is 5 litas ($1.25) for adults and 3 litas ($0.75) for children.

"Lithuanians are going through a tough period right now, so I' ve kept the ticket prices low. Traveling here is expensive because of gas prices, so I don't want to add to their burden," said Malinauskas. He points to his conspicuously massive house overlooking the park: "That house is my gift to my children and grandchildren. This park is my gift to Lithuania's children and grandchildren."