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In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore Keith Lowe's *Prisoners of History* and the contested world of memorialisation – focusing on one of the strangest and most controversial memorial sites in Europe.
Monuments occupy public space, and they impose meaning on it. Walk through any city and you'll find statues placed with particular agendas – to memorialise the past in certain ways, to place a particular interpretation on history. As a result, they are almost always contested. The recent removal of statues associated with the transatlantic slave trade, from Edward Colston in Bristol to Confederate monuments across the American South, provoked a furious reaction from the right, who framed it as a free speech issue. What they were really defending was the right of white supremacy to own and occupy public space.
Keith Lowe argues that there is no escaping the monsters of our past. We can try to ignore them, rehabilitate them, or annihilate them – but their absence becomes its own kind of presence. There is only one final course open to us: ridicule.
This brings us to Grūtas Park in Lithuania – a sculpture park displaying the statues of Stalin, Lenin, and other Soviet figures that were torn down after independence in 1990. Lithuania's 20th century was one of repeated invasion, occupation, and mass deportation. Around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags in the 1940s and 50s. So when independence came, the statues were decapitated, blowtorched, and dynamited. The government then stored the best-known examples in warehouses – until a former wrestling champion and mushroom farmer named Viliumas Malinauskas offered to take them off their hands and build a park.
His proposals were extraordinary: tourists arriving on cattle trucks, actors dressed as guards herding them onto trains, barbed wire, guard towers, the whole gulag experience. Critics called it a "Stalin theme park." Over a million people signed a petition against it. Former partisans and political prisoners accused Malinauskas of profiting from their misery.
But the park opened anyway – and became a hit. What makes Grūtas Park so interesting, and so troubling, is that it creates a space that is completely ahistorical. It was built in the era of the "end of history," when we thought we could turn the past into a meaningless theme park.
History didn't end. Spoiler alert.
**Topics covered:**
- Keith Lowe's *Prisoners of History*
- The contest over public memorials and public space
- Francis Galton, eugenics, and the limits of ridicule
- Lithuania's experience of Soviet and Nazi occupation
- The fate of Stalin and Lenin statues after 1990
- Viliumas Malinauskas and the creation of Grūtas Park
- The petition, the protests, and the constitutional court ruling
- The postmodern, ahistorical aesthetics of the park
- The "end of history" and its illusions
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