A piece on BBC World last night caught my eye: an adventure park in Lithuania is offering visitors a trip back behind the Iron Curtain with KGB style interrogations and beatings.
Footage of tourists being whipped with a leather belt inside a grim Gulag camp had me staring in disbelief, but yes, there really is a Soviet Union theme park just outside the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. This strange tourist attraction is in an old secret TV station bunker, and is called Grūtas Park.
According to reports tourists pay to be "beaten, interrogated and shouted at" by tour leaders dressed as agents of the Russian secret police, the KGB.
The park’s organisers believe that for those old enough to remember living under Soviet rule a trip to the park can be cathartic: "There are still many people in Lithuania who are sick with Soviet nostalgia so we've started this show to help them recover," a spokeswoman for the park told Reuters.
For younger visitors it is intended as an interactive history lesson.
Visitors are chased through labyrinthine tunnels, with any wrong footedness resulting in a shaking up from a KGB agent. The tour takes two hours, and costs about 35 Euros.
Grūtas Park is unofficially called Stalin's World or Stalin World.
Photo by azkid2lt (via Flickr.com and Creative Commons).
