Welcome to Stalin World!

Grutas Park is a sculpture park in woodlands deep in the Lithuanian countryside. It is otherwise known as Stalin World, as though it were Lithuania’s answer to Disney World. Perhaps it is.

The main feature of the park is the collection of dozens of statues and busts of former Communist leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Karl Marx and the founders of the Communist regime that ruled Lithuania when it was part of the Soviet Union before 1990.

Grutas Park was the brainchild of Viliumas Malinauskas, who was at various times a heavyweight wrestling champion, a Soviet-era soldier and the manager of a collective farm. After the fall of Communism he made a fortune from mushroom farming, and it was this money that led him to create Stalin World.

In 1998 he bought many of the statues and busts that now grace the park when these came up for auction having been removed from public display in various towns and cities. Some of these were enormous lumps of granite or bronze whereas others were relatively small. Many had been damaged when being toppled from their previous places of honour.

Malinauskas had no wish to venerate these people – many of whom had been responsible for the death of thousands of people, but to remind visitors of the history of the Soviet Union and how terrible it had been.

To this end, Malinauskas acquired other features of the Soviet system, such as watchtowers from which Soviet-era military music blares, and other reminders of the “gulag” system of camps for political imprisonment. The closest one gets to a Disney World experience is the short train ride one can take in a cattle wagon – ushered on board by uniformed guards – to a reconstructed prison camp surrounded by barbed wire.

After opening Grutas Park in 2001, Viliumas Malinauskas reminded visitors that it was better to see something once than hear about it ten times.

© John Welford

A few facts about atoms

Everybody knows that all matter is composed of atoms, but there some facts about atoms that almost boggle the mind!

For example, we all know that atoms are extremely small, but did you know that you could fit two billion atoms into the dot on top of each letter “i” in “billion”?

An atom consists of a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, and electrons that whizz in orbit round the nucleus. There are as many electrons as there are protons in the nucleus.

However, what is not generally appreciated is that an atom consists mainly of empty space! If you could imagine an atom that was the size of a sports stadium, such as a Premiership football ground, then the electrons would be whizzing round the upper tiers of the stands and the nucleus would be a pea in the centre circle!

In other words, all matter is an illusion – everything that exists does so thanks to the energy contained in atoms. The actual matter in the atoms is almost non-existent.

© John Welford

How the Pacific Ocean got its name

Why is the Pacific Ocean so named? It was thanks to the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed across it in 1520. His voyage down the eastern side of South America had been beset by storms and so, when he eventually found a passage to the west (through what is now known as the Strait of Magellan) he was greatly impressed by the calm sea he found on the other side.

The Spanish word “pacifico” means peaceful, and so it seemed to be an appropriate name to give this newly-discovered ocean. Of course, no ocean is without its bad weather, although the Atlantic does experience more storms than the Pacific. However, Magellan’s original impression was what he marked on his map and the name has stuck!

What Magellan did not appreciate was that the Pacific, at 166 million square kilometres, was twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean and the world’s deepest, at up to 4000 metres. The Pacific Ocean is actually larger than all the world’s land surfaces put together.

© John Welford