Grutas Parkas,
Lithuania
Personal travel impressions in stories and pictures from Grutas Parkas, Lithuania. Click on the pictures to enlarge, send as a free e-card, or download for personal use. You can locate Grutas Parkas and navigate the world using Google Earth
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N 54° 1.998
E 24° 4.968
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An important ingredient in the reinforcement of the Communist ideology was a varying degree of personal idolization, which often took the form of sometimes enormous statues erected all around the Communist world. Leaders and ideologists would look down on the people, impressing them, trying to convince them they were living a just life as long as they followed the ideology.
There have been many hundreds of thousands of statues in squares, streets, palaces, museums, stations and other public places to underpin the regimes authority. One of the first things that happened after the fall of Communism, was toppling those statues. Who doesn't remember the images of Lenins taken away by huge cranes, heads broken off bodies, fallen heroes lying on the squares where they had tried to influence public thought for decades?
Question is: where did those statues go? In Lithuania, they were auctioned years ago, and a local millionaire bought the lot. He has opened a controversial "attraction park" where he tries to reinvoke the atmosphere of the infamous Soviet gulags, complete with watchtowers and trenches. Walking around the park, you can once again see the fallen ideological persons, tap Stalin on his shoulder, sit next to Lenin, while reading about their deeds.
