MAY DAY IN STALIN WORLD

...We will bury you,” she teases in an East European-accented whisper, leaning back against a wall of bookshelves crammed with more Communist Party literature than the office of a Berkeley Women’s Studies professor...

...A small building housing a mock-up of a Soviet-era polling station is a popular destination...

...No doubt originally intended as a bold representation of collectivist virility, the painting looks more like a paean to global warming, an upbeat rendering of the An Inconvenient Truth advert...

...Brood after brood break into uproarious laughter as each family patriarch inevitably leaps behind the podium to do his best histrionic Khrushchev...

...This matter of taste was codified in his 1932 decree, “On the Reconstruc tion of Literary and Art Organizations,” designating Socialist Realism as the only legitimate approach to art...

...Few critics were placated when Malinauskas told reporters on opening day in 2001 that he aimed In 1918 Lenin decried Communists who could not recognize he was simply “just like everybody else...

...A vocal minority, however, including some powerful politicians, see the park as little more than gaudy exploitation...

...Few are as horrifying as the Museum of Genocide Victims in the former KGB headquarters of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where a rubber straitjacket woven into a padded wall “for those who resist or were deranged from torture” is on display near an “execution cell” and visitors can squeeze into the stifling coffin-sized lockboxes in which dissidents of yore listened to o i n u m m o , s i i e r e h w e l . s n o ti a g o r r t i n w o ther n p e risoners bein E g s tortured in w V h ln ile u aw C aiting the s ir t statues have been replaced with mostly indigenous heroes, aside from a bizarrely pop ular bust of Frank Zappa, whose “anti-establishment stance,” Adrian IgRuTas, lITHuanIa Others turn to woodstove-warmed galleries for respite...

...To Malinauskas’s credit, Stalin World does display the horrific alongside its kitschy nostalgia pieces...

...Strolling Red Square or standing beside Lenin at some pivotal moment is the friskiest the Man of Steel gets on canvas...

...An English-speaking tour guide on break translated the sign for me, then reminisced about how terribly unfunny 1970s Soviet-approved cartoons were and wondered aloud whether her nation’s sense of humor mightn’t have otherwise developed differently if any thing truly funny hadn’t been so necessarily subversive, so rooted in the black/gallows tradition...

...The revolution needed workers, after all, not floating amorphous blobs with noses where their eyes should be...

...A burly man, an impossibly wide smile shearing his joyladen face, immediately tears off his shoe and bangs it on the wooden pulpit...

...The Party clearly got over this modesty hangup...

...to combine “the charms of a Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag prison camp...

...Thus, even the paintings depicting the 1917 Revolution are populated by the 1940s Stalin rather than the younger, more stylish preM a y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 2 5 M a y d a y a T s T a l I n w o R l d revolutionary exile who looked a bit like an anorexic Animal House-era John Belushi...

...Eventually sunshine will break the clouds’ stranglehold on the sky, but for now the morning is overcast and a cold misty rain chills...

...An amusement park rooted in a nightmare that will not be soon forgotten...

...In another painting Father Revolution, rosy-cheeked and jolly, sits around a campfire with children, looking as if Burl Ives should be narrating in his best Rudolph the There are only slightly fewer portraits of Stalin, mostly cast profiles or stern straightforward portraits, always in uniform, always the same Go ahead, make my day glint of liquidation in his eyes...

...Put your best foot forward, though, comrade, lest you wind up sporting the Order of the Labor Glory, Third Class...

...By shawn Macomber 2 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 s H a w n M a c o M b e R t is may Day at stalin WorlD and the celebratory anthems of the October Revolution fill the air, blaring from every barbwire-bespeckled olive guard tower to the rough unfinished wood of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin festooned bandstand...

...There is the four-foot high face of the vanguard of the vanguard of the revo lution woven into a rug near a diorama depicting him dipping into an inkwell by lamplight at a desk amongst mini hay bales in a model loft...

...Putna became World toting these gifts in bags bearing the image of a battalion commander in the Tsarist army and… a smiling Stalin set in a red star—a marketing device promptly deserted with his entire unit to the outlaw made out of the imagery meant to help destroy Red Army, within the ranks of which he soon became marketing...

...The tour guide lights a cigarette and goes quiet...

...Who could not love a self-effacing T-shirt with a slogan like “Lithuania…Hmm, but where is it...

...That appellation reeks of a vanity accolade for a mid-level Communist official’s ne’er-do-well nephew...

...Picture the envy on your neighbors’ faces when they see that Lenin’s Order of the October Revolution medal pinned to your chest...

...Call it, There’s Waldo, Better Look Busy and Loyal...

...For the anti-Soviet, a few items featuring the classic big hammer-and-sickle black spider on a web labeled C.C.C.P...

...The apogee of this school is the massive Industry, with its proudly rendered smokestacks belching soot into the sky...

...True to Soviet Realism, there is nearly Lithuanian souvenirs generally exude a wonderful tongue-incheek flair...

...As revelers file in through the faux border crossing, parents lift offspring up to spin wide giddy circles in the same cattle car, political prisoners were once claustrophobically crammed en route to Siberia...

...The Party clearly got over this modesty hang-up...

...Secret ballots were technically allowed, but inadvisable...

...The proletariat was to focus on the goals of the next Five-Year Plan, not fall under the spell of cubism, surrealism, or abstract expressionism...

...s H a w n M a c o M b e R Sugar Beets, or Best Pig Breeder...

...The Soviet times are finished, so now we can go and look and laugh, no fear, and remember what we are free from...

...d n , e s a l t o h s , t r i s - T n o r a e p p a l l a n l a t S d n a ot all the Park’s statues came crashing .50-cali b i er brass bullet casing h s. L s enin, M g arx s , E s ng a els, purges and the purged...

...Then e i s y r t n u o c n a i n a u h t i L h i t a n qu Ce ie u t P h on m a l e tim n e, t G e rutas was simply anoth d er Viliumas Malinauskas, the canned mushroom king of Lithuania, won the right to collect the abandoned detritus of Soviet occupation for public exhibition...

...The Soviet Union cherished the propaganda value of a “democratic” election to certify its tyranny in newly minted, ill-gotten territories, so unless already placed on the burgeoning subversives watch list—admittedly not a terribly difficult feat to accomplish in those days—every citizen was required to cast a ballot for the sole Party-sanctioned candidate...

...Not far from a preserved newspaper carrying a frontpage picture of Lithuanian Communists returning from the Soviet Union and the black humor headline “They Return Bringing the Sun of Stalin’s Constitution,” for example, you will find a large display of KGB propaganda photos: The headless torso of a partisan...

...In virtually any city of note in the Baltics there is a museum filled with terrifying artifacts of the Soviet-Nazi-Soviet…again occupations...

...A few dozen yards ahead a howitzerringed playground beckons, along with a small zoo featuring llamas, strange miniature owls, giant boars, warthogs, and the most miserable, freezing camels and kangaroos you have ever seen...

...The scene is all very flippantly amusing...

...It happened before these children were born, yet not so long ago...

...It is the sort of painting Greenpeace supporters likely assume decorates the Crawford, Texas, ranch of George W. Bush as they squawk about the virtues of regulation and limiting individual choice...

...As the Soviet’s handpicked puppet Lithuanian Prime Minister Justas Paleckis once M a y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 2 3 Bridge wrote in Baltic City Paper, “made him a cult figure in Lithuania and much of Eastern Europe during Soviet times,” despite the fact that the psychedelic rock guitarist never set foot in the country...

...Romas Kalanta, whose self- immolation on May 14, 1972, in front of the Music Theater in Kaunas (where Lithu ania’s Communist turncoats surrendered independence in 1940) to protest Soviet oppression sparked two days of rioting and anti-Soviet resistance, is also honored...

...Who could not love a self-effacing T-shirt with a slogan Lithuanian souvenirs generally exude a like “Lithuania…Hmm, but where is it...

...always a government bureaucrat with a little notebook somewhere in the foreground in these paintings...

...Malinauskas has made some concessions to his critics, abandoning plans to build a train line from Vilnius so visitors could be “deported” to the park via cattle car and shifting raucous May Day parades, complete with rose-throwing ceremonies for Lenin and Stalin impersonators, to Victory Day, a holiday with much less cultural baggage, celebrating the end of World War II...

...Cases filled with “Red Banner” awards encourage visitors to imagine the joy of the nomenklatura recognizing you—a mere peasant modestly serving the revolution!—as your district’s Best Combine Operator, Best Grower of 2 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 Red-Nosed Cheka Enforcer baritone...

...At Stalin World today, it’s something to make your kids laugh...

...Going to the booth, then, was somewhat akin to sending the KGB a postcard requesting surveillance and a lengthy interrogation session...

...Children hang from granite limbs...

...Some seek shelter in a twofloor lodge-style café manned by waitstaff wearing the red scarves and sharp white-collared shirts of Young Pioneers, eating sprat po russki (sprats, onion, vodka), Nostalgija borscht, latkes and—praise be to the Komsomol for small mercies—sweet banana and chocolate crepes...

...wonderful tongue-in-cheek flair...

...Thus, visitors to Grutas Park can now become reacquainted with the stone likeness of Vitovt Putna: Imprisoned as a young Marxist revo- As I stood outside the gates waiting for the bus lutionary, he was released as part of a general mobil- back to Druskininkai, I watched dozens exit Stalin ization to fight the Great War in 1915...

...90 chiseled likenesses of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Stalin, and other (anti)heroes stoically pose for photographs...

...observed, “A person having no doubts at all will take the ballot and go straight to the ballot box and only the one who wants to cross out”—voting, essentially, none of the above by running a line through the candidate’s name—“will go to the booth...

...Onot far from the Belarus border...

...In 1937 he was recalled to Moscow by Stalin…and summarily executed, an inglorious fate he was by no means alone in suffering...

...In l d s eed, ma i n m y fell m uch earlier...

...Children hang from granite their limbs...

...The boar snorts...

...ensure that revolutionary iconography reflected the N o t d e g i l b o s a w s l a e R t i a i c o , l a r e f A do t wn in l 19 S 91...

...No one would be driving to Grutas if Stalin was still around,” a hotel clerk in Druskininkai explained...

...M a y d a y a T s T a l I n w o R l d At Stalin World, though, they let the good times roll...

...There’s No Happier Youth in the World Than Soviet Youth...

...Then again, perhaps he simply dictated his manuscripts...

...Is all of this happening because of the implications of this place or despite it...

...At Stalin World, unsurprisingly, the kiosks are peddling much different wares...

...A woman’s face, mouth wide open, eyes gouged out...

...One mug features a smiling Khrushchev, shoe in hand on one side, and the Statue of Liberty on the other...

...Utter that mouthful in nearby Druskininkai, however, and the response to your query will without fail begin with a polite correction: Stalin World, da...

...Parade or no, though, the proletariat still comes out in droves for the Workers’ holiday...

...Here, in oil on canvas, is Lenin giving a speech at the docks, leading a march, directing peasant fighters, looking pensively skyward as if to confirm, in fact, that God does not exist...

...Now alongside a meandering, circuitous stream in a patch of Lithuanian woods, nearly 90 chiseled likenesses of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Stalin, and other revolutionary/Red Army (anti)heroes stoically pose for endless photographs...

...2 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...

...From this vantage, the Soviet Union looks more like a 70-year 4-H club meeting rather than an expansionist terror state...

...Between the wars he helped Now, tell me again, who won the Class War...

...implement Stalin’s plans to refine the Red Army and was welcomed into the Order of the Red Banner for distinguished service and sent abroad as a military attaché to Japan, Finland, Germany, and, finally, Great Britain...

...A quarter of a million visitors now use a wood plank walkway designed to resemble those of Siberian gulags to negotiate the Soviet Sculpture Garden at Grutas Park each year...

...Most of the non-iconic paintings on display were portraits of scenes with self-explanatory titles such as Fisherman’s Port in Klaipeda, Socialist Agricultural Construction, On a Visit to a Pig Breeder, and Harvest for the State...

...The hammer and sickle park logo graces mugs, commemorative books, postcards, and buttons...

...It’s Where’s Waldo?...if Waldo were recast as a party apparatchik who proved his loyalty (and earned his hush-hush bourgeoisie benefits) by ratting out actual members of the proletariat for real, perceived, or invented disloyalty...

...AI wandered through Stalin World’s art g o t a g n l l o p e t t e c s u r h K g i d ft n er leaving h b h eh v in s D a the h small a i rmy st of b i u a d n l - - , leries...

...The children giggle...

...Nevertheless, the longer you stand below those Marx and Engels portraits, a Red Army mannequin soldier glaring out from his play-post, the more disconcerting it becomes...

...Malinauskas, the son of a gulag survivor, insists he is simply helping his countrymen face the horrors of the past...

...A group of dead twenty- something young men— awkward in their rigor mortis—posed, bizarrely, with typewriters in their laps...

...a sign proclaims...

...a Commissar Chief...

...In 1918 Lenin decried Communists who could not recognize he was simply “just like everybody else...

...And while you will see a few Brits here and a handful of Germans there, a quick glance at license plates in the parking lot confirms most visitors are from Baltic states...

...A park guide I interviewed earlier motions to me at one point and announces, “Amerikanski...

...Either Brezhnev had a team of ghostwriters, I muse, scanning the titles over her shoulder, or he spent most of his General Secretariat writing furiously...

...A beautiful young woman carrying a plastic bag full of Lenin shot glasses sidles up as he hammers away...

...Creative enterprise, it seems, was about as popular with Stalin as free enterprise...

...Time to take the statue down, comrades...

...The serene mug shots of doomed Lithuanian Red Army riflemen, sentenced to death for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to Mos cow after the Nazis were vanquished and, worse, singing the anthem of independent Lithuania...