Building 'Stalinworld'.(Information Center and Museum of Grutas Park, Lithuania)(Brief Article)

The gates to the gulag will open on April 1. And if Lithuanian millionaire Viliomas Malinauskas has his way, this time around his countrymen will be begging to get in. In a forest just outside his country's capital city of Vilnius, Malinauskas has created the world's first theme park modeled on Soviet-era labor camps--complete with watchtowers, Orwellian slogans and statues of Soviet leaders. Malinauskas's original plan--to have visitors herded on to cattle cars at the local train station and "deported" straight to the museum--was derailed by Lithuania's Ministry of Culture. "I don't know what they thought was wrong with that," he says. "It's not far. It's less than a kilometer."

Malinauskas refers to his new creation as the "Information Center and Museum of Grutas Park," but others already have a catchier name: Stalinworld. Once it's up and running, the price tag for each dose of totalitarian deja vu will be $1.25, But Malinauskas isn't in it for the money. "All traces of the Soviet regime are disappearing, even from our history books. It's easy to forget," he told NEWSWEEK. "I don't want future schoolchildren to think life was better under Stalin or Lenin." As in many former Soviet states, Lithuania's transition to democracy has meant a rough decade of economic uncertainty.

Historians say that up to 456,000 people--one out of every three adults in Lithuania at the time--were imprisoned, deported or executed after the Red Army first invaded the country in 1940. An estimated 60,000 survivors are still living in Lithuania today. But discussing the gulag was banned during the Soviet years, and even after ...