From Russia with Lunch (9 page)

Like some dark doppelganger to Europas Parkas, Stalin Land features raised wooden walkways through quiet pine forests and up-tempo streams. Standing up to four metres high and masterfully crafted, the pieces on show are undeniably impressive. The ritual decapitations enacted by the Lithuanian public after independence have been remedied and here Lenin stands with a benign smile, clenched jaw and far-off gaze. Stalin also features, his considerable facial deficiencies smoothed to resemble Omar Sharif in
Funny Girl.
Karl Marx naturally gets a guernsey too, although he's given a kind of benevolent Father Christmas vibe. Over fifty sculptures featuring the Soviet all-stars are arranged on the Grutas Park circuit and there is not a weak chin among them.

The extent of the idealisation in this metalwork becomes wincingly clear in one of the park's half-dozen log cabin galleries which contain photographs of these politicians. Let's just say the ‘before' shots are radically different from the ‘after' casts. For an ideology that loathed religion, these communists sure loved an icon. The onsite portrait gallery featured: Lenin in plaster, Lenin's death mask, a hokey oil painting of Lenin in the fields ministering messianically to some honest farmer folk, Lenin in tapestry, Lenin in mosaic, Lenin in woodblock. I wandered back onto the sculpture path convinced that Vanity For The Proleteriat would be an excellent name for a band.

Affixed to each of the menacing guardtowers – made all the more so by the use of shop dummies inside them – was a tannoy system blasting the pseudo-stirring strains of communist era musical propaganda. Think drinking songs meet Gilbert & Sullivan with a dash of Rosemary Clooney. Every May Day these tunes would be put on even higher rotation as folks dressed up in their communist-era best and took to the Grutas Park stage for lookalike contests, traditional Russian dancing, the crowning of Miss Grutas Park and all manner of jovial remembrances. It's no wonder Lithuanian authorities insist on tempering the fervour. Their success, however, is mixed.

By the doner kebab kiosk, stood a pavilion dedicated to the spurious notion of democratic elections under the Russian regime. In the 1948 poll, for example, 300,000 agents were stationed at booths throughout the Soviet Union instructing voters how – as in for whom – they should cast their ballots. In many cases, these agents actually watched over citizens to ensure they filled in the ballot papers ‘correctly'.

Aside from one gargantuan three-metre-high and four across carving of anonymous soldiers plus another of a young Lithuanian woman who was executed by partisans for being a Russian collaborator, Malinauskas' entire collection seemed to comprise communist bigwigs and a host of regional apparatchiks. The renditions of handsome young anonymous workers that appeared elsewhere throughout Lithuania – and only survived because they were created under duress by local artists – didn't get a look-in here.

What did make it into the exhibition was a 100-metre-long laminated wall festooned with articles about Malinauskas and his endeavours. In another section of the park was a collection of bitter correspondence that he had received from critics and survivors of the deportations. Both seemed presented with equal pride. Malinauskas' determination to see his project through has undoubtedly scored him many enemies – as the slap-happy, no-necked security grunters roaming the premises might suggest. It has also played no small part in the resurgence of Druski-ninkai as a tourist destination. As unseemly as its themes may be to some, Grutas Park is one of the nation's primary tourist attractions and some work has clearly been undertaken to ensure that nostalgia isn't presented as remembrance. Whether the appropriate balance has been achieved remains in the eyes of the 100,000 visitors who file in each year.

For me, it didn't come close. Perhaps it was the faux-jolly songs being played over the PA system. Perhaps it was the onsite petting zoo complete with shivering tropical birds and the world's loneliest kangaroo. Perhaps it was because only a few days before, I had spent the afternoon in the KGB's primary execution facility in Lithuania.

Built in 1899 to serve as a courthouse, it is not as ornate as others on Gedimino Prospektas but rather exudes the quiet authority befitting a house of justice. Or at least it once did.

For five decades (with a stutter from 1941 to 1944 when the German Gestapo occupied the building), it was the headquarters of the NKVD (Lithuania's KGB). Now housing the Museum of Genocide Victims, the basement prison is exactly as the Soviets left it in August 1991. Menacing and morbid, the facility is accessed by a series of buckling concrete steps. The temperature seems to dip with each. Prudently designed to mirror a prisoner's experience on entering the facility, the first holding cells encountered are termed ‘boxes'. Picture the metal detectors you walk through at the airport, put a wall on one end, a door on the other and you'll have yourself a dimensionally accurate reproduction of these spaces. Then add absolute darkness.

The political agitators who did time here spent their first several hours of incarceration on their feet in these cubicles as they had been expressly designed to render sitting impossible. This was the first cruel detail in a litany of inhumanities the sole intent of which was to break the spirit and the flesh – though not necessarily in that order. It was a win-win for the Soviets: those who cracked gave up valuable information about others resisting the regime; those who didn't were slaughtered then put on public display as a warning to anyone else with ideas of personal or national liberty.

The next room along a corridor rendered ghostly luminous by the combination of fluorescent strip lighting and a pockmarked concrete floor was the search cell. Here, prisoners were relieved of their belts, shoelaces and belongings. Every button was also removed lest prisoners try to swallow or sharpen them in an effort to commit suicide. After being fingerprinted and photographed, detainees were placed in cells which were approximately 2.5 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. Between ten and fifteen prisoners were crammed into each and by 1946, a facility with a capacity of 300 had swelled to 451 inmates. The walls and floors were concrete and being underground often iced over with condensation. Lights were kept on day and night making sleep even harder to come by. Inmates were also monitored constantly as they were forbidden from leaning against walls during the day and had to stand 50 centimetres away from each other.

One of the few forms of self-expression and communication available to prisoners was carving declarations of freedom, or simply their own names, into the walls. Such statements were an anathema to the prison guards who covered them swiftly, lest they fortify the spirits of the men whose breaking points were experimented with on a daily basis. Tests carried out between 1995 and 1996 revealed eighteen separate coats of paint in certain cells.

Despite having some reservations about the jail-as-tourist-attraction phenomenon, I am invariably drawn to these fading behemoths as they reveal as much about the society in which they operated as they do the staff and occupants. They also force you to ask yourself what, if any, principles you would be willing to sacrifice freedom for and how you would cope with brutal confinement. At the three other penal institutions I have visited – Tasmania's Port Arthur, San Francisco's Alcatraz and South Africa's Rob-ben Island – there is a similarly palpable sense of gnawing gloom and abject hopelessness to that which pervades the Vilnius Museum of Genocide Victims. Yet each of these also possesses an austere physical beauty from which I hoped I could take some solace should I have been incarcerated there. This parlour of terror, however, was secreted below ground in the city centre. Thousands of citizens walked by every day, not knowing or not wanting to know of the torture taking place beneath the vents in which their heels might have become briefly wedged.

It's hardly surprising that many inmates lost their mind under such duress. They were housed in five of the grimmest rooms in the prison. One of these padded cells remains. Lined with rough burlap sacks and a leather floor, it is dominated by a black straitjacket hanging on a dumb valet. In order to prevent the wearer from using his hands to tear at himself or others, the sleeves of these garments trail on for several metres to a closed point. These were then wrapped around the prisoner, thus limiting mobility even further. In this exhibit, however, the sleeves had been suspended from points where the walls met the ceiling, resulting in a long-limbed wraith-like effect that churned my innards and iced my neck.

The raw howls of agony, fear and horror that were absorbed by this room push the boundaries of nightmare to ever darker realms, especially when you consider that one of the techniques the Soviets used to extricate information from prisoners involved getting them hooked on powerful drugs such as heroin then withholding it until they betrayed their ideals. All the more sobering is the fact that these fit-outs were still taking place in 1973.

One cell along contained a cruelty of brutally simple conception. Essentially a basin, it had in its centre a circular platform the size of a modest pizza box. The room was flooded with water – which solidified in winter – and prisoners were forced to balance on the metal plate for up to twelve hours or face hypothermia. With this calibre of torture regularly dealt to those accused of anti-Soviet activities, it's hardly surprising that many prisoners confessed to crimes they did not commit. At the mock trials which eventuated from these proceedings, not a single acquittal was recorded.

The place was a vacuum for mercy and compassion. This was underlined by the treatment of resistance leader Adol-fas Ramanauskas, who was beaten so brutally during the first two hours of his interrogation that guards feared he would die before revealing all of his secrets. These soldiers then decided to take him to hospital in order to extract the maximum amount of information possible but were executed for their trouble.

In addition to armed partisans, between 1944 and 1953, 362 priests were also jailed here for practising their beliefs and ministering to their flocks. One of the cells is given over to a memorial to the men of God who saw the worst atrocities humans could perpetrate on one another and somehow not only retained their faith but compelled others around them to do likewise. Next door is another cell featuring black-and-white portraits of the jail's wardens and commandants. All are festooned with medallions and have dead eyes.

Furniture such as beds was introduced in 1947 with linen following thirteen years later. Inmates wore their own clothes but those in solitary confinement had to make do with just their underwear. Others were dosed with a barrage of antipsychotics that tranquillised them to the point of being mere shells whose bodies were on autopilot and whose consciousness had been disabled. In some cases, bodies were disposed of in staged car accidents. Hygiene was pitiful at best with one visit to the adjacent lavatory block being permitted each day and a communal bucket functioning as a toilet in between. Showers were a monthly affair – a cell at a time – and inmates recalled the wardens switching the water between scalding and freezing for a laugh.

Running from the prison proper lies a corridor which provides the visitor with two options. The first leads to five walled yards each the size of the service square on a tennis court. Up until the end of the Stalin era, inmates were given 10-15 minutes of exercise per day. They walked in a circle with their hands behind their backs. Speaking was forbidden. In subsequent years, this time was extended to an hour with prisoners allowed to sit down and exercise independently in the cramped exercise courtyards.

The second route leads to the museum's arguably most austere and certainly most morbid exhibit. A sign at the entrance to the execution chamber warns that the exhibit may be too confronting for some and I found myself asking if my understanding of the events would genuinely be heightened by seeing the precise spot where firing squads carried out their fatal orders. The pathway is made of a floating glass floor. Below it, a series of mundane objects – a comb, a shoe, an apron – lie scattered on a palette of finegrained sand. Each is numbered and corresponds to a photograph on the surrounding walls. Those who died here lived in an era when photographs were not the digital conveniences of today. Rather, they marked milestones, and happy ones at that: weddings, the christening of a first child, a daughter's confirmation. It's this beaming collage, snap-frozen in a moment of hope, that adds a mordant gravitas to what comes next.

Walking their green mile, prisoners would face three men seated at a table. The prosecutor, an NKVD official and the prison chief would read out the charges of which the condemned man had been found guilty before handing him over to a guard. He would then be ushered to a bullet-riddled wall which abutted a sluice-friendly sloping floor. Here, he would again face a trio of men, only this time all he could see of them were their rifle barrels. Standing behind a screen to avoid ricocheting bullets, the soldiers would aim for the head or heart, the kill in the name of Mother Russia.

The period spanning 1944 to 1947 was particularly horrific. Up to forty executions a night took place with the prison chief, one V Dolgirev, often taking the role of executioner. The accumulated corpses were stacked in an adjacent timber room before being driven away for mass burial. Precisely how many people were executed in this chamber remains unknown. What is certain, however, is that 767 were dumped into trenches in the nearby town of Tusku-lenai. After 1950 – when the death penalty was restored in the Soviet Union for treason, espionage and sabotage – the network of burial sites mushroomed and authorities estimate that there are still several undiscovered mass graves within a 30-kilometre radius of Vilnius.

The scale and savagery of what took place in this building left me drained and dour. With a head full of answerless questions about the capacity for human cruelty, I took a seat in a small adjacent park then called home to tell everyone who mattered that I loved them.