PARC GRŪTO

On 15 June 1940, 150 000 Red Army soldiers entered Lithuania. Until 1990, the application of the ideology of the «foreign» regime is causing considerable damage: 360 000 persons are imprisoned, killed or deported; 440 000 leave the territory. It is one third of the population that disappears.

The visit begins by immersing you directly in the atmosphere: Barbelés and mirador, as if you enter a camp, and on the left, the time wagon (zisai) is there to remind, or make concrete, the conditions of transport of the deportees to Siberia. The trip lasted for a month, without hygiene or health. A thousand people were leaving each day for the Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Tomsk regions. On the right, all the press clippings in many countries, including France, remind us that, at the opening, this park was not unanimous.

It is after this entry that you have to pay the right of entry. In particular, the park exposes all the statues of the great Russian and Lithuanian dignitaries who were déboulonnées from the country's squares to the fall of the regime in 1990. All of these dignitaires, bronze-carved dignitaries, all of these groups of workers or supporters who were part of the old landscape were, for the most part, recovered by Viliumas Malinauskas, a businessman who made fortune in preserved mushrooms. The statues of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels are the most numerous. We will note that of the first gulag of the first gulag Feliks Dzerzhinsky (who will inspire the idea of concentration camps later). Some sculptures are accompanied by a biography of the tyrant. The visit of the museum, the library and the'house of culture'is appalling: medals, films and comments retrace the alienation made for 50 years. As we walk between these ghosts of a bygone era, here and there, the speakers distils Soviet partisan songs. The park offers more fun spaces, especially for children: a zoo and games.