Soviet fun park now open!

Communism.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see that word?

If your answer was “A fun-filled day for the whole family”, than Lithuania has the theme park for you! Called Grūtas Park, it was opened in 2001 by mushroom and berry magnate Viliumas Malinauskas.

It features statues, sculptures and paintings from the Soviet era, including 65 statues of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev and others, with other examples of Communist propaganda. You can view Soviet Youth posters and see the cattle trucks that once transported prisoners to Siberia.

There is also a zoo, for some reason.

The theme park is surrounded by barbed wire and guard posts in a replica of a Siberian slave labour camp. “It combines the charms of a Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag”, Malinauskas reportedly said at the park’s official opening.

From Totalitaria:

A few hundred yards from his office window, for instance, stands a large, green, Soviet locomotive. Malinauskas’s original plan was to renovate a railway track which would have led all the way to Vilnius. There, visitors would have been herded by uniformed KGB men into replicas of the cattle trucks used to take Lithuanians to the Gulags. This ambitious scheme has had to be scaled down in the face of widespread outrage, though he still hopes that “they will be deported right into our information centre”.

Also in Lithuania, you can view the former KGB prison in Vilnius, the capital city.