Sunday’s Boston Globe highlights one of the world’s most unusual tours: a Lithuanian group invites travelers to subject themselves to Soviet terror in “1984: The Survival Drama.” According to writer Rory Boland, the experience was designed to counter “creeping nostalgia” for the Soviet era, now almost 20 years in the past, and ignorance among Lithuanians too young to remember it. Participants must sign a disclaimer agreeing to “psychological and/or physical punishments” that include being sworn at by oversized agents, forced to move piles of rubble pointlessly back and forth, threatened by guard dogs, compelled to applaud during lectures on the evils of capitalism, and interrogated by the KGB while someone is ostensibly whipped nearby. The tour is not, Boland writes, “for the faint-hearted”:
The soldiers are actors, and participants can just laugh the experience off. However, anyone even breaking into a smirk is treated to a dressing down. The bullying and intimidation are genuinely unnerving and everyone in the group keeps their eyes firmly fixed on the floor. The sense of unease is so pervasive that as we’re frog marched down into the bunker, two in our group of “detainees” head back to the bus.
[There are] forced runs in gas masks and a disturbing trip to a Soviet-era doctor. Throughout, participants are verbally abused and humiliated…. As we’re finally ushered into the Soviet-era shop to pick up some period toilet paper or canned herring, everyone is exhausted.
I would probably give this a whirl if I ever found myself in Vilnius. The closest I’ve come to such an experience was a walk through the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where signs and paintings explained the mind-bending varieties of torture the Khmer Rouge had inflicted on innocents just 25 years earlier. It was horrifying to contemplate what had happened there, but the cells were sunny and serene; the danger had palpably passed. “Some say the [1984] drama trivializes the past, while others say it cashes in on the suffering of victims,” Boland writes, but I’d say the Lithuanians have found a creative way to illuminate history for those who care to remember. “If you want to fully enjoy daylight,” tour producer Ruta Vanagaite told Vice magazine, “you have to get into the dark for a while.”
