TALLINN – Many of Russia’s cemeteries are neglected or vandalized, others have been plowed under or otherwise left unmarked, and yet a third group features pompous monuments to the powerful of the moment, according to a Russian journalist who has surveyed burial places across the Russian Federation.

And this “squalid” situation with regard to the way that society treats the dead, Aleksandr Kalinin writes in “Gudok,” reflects less “the squalid life” of the Russian people than their “squalid understanding of it,” a defect that he traces back to the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet period.

In his article, Kalinin gives some truly disturbing catalogue of the state of cemeteries in the Russian Federation now. In one place, where Russians who fought against Napoleon found their final rest, there is now a special rest house erected for Communist officials who “distracted themselves there with vodka and girls.”

In another location, the site of a Nazi concentration camp where more than 7,000 Soviet people – “both military and civilian and of various nationalities and faiths” – were murdered, local officials in Soviet times and since have not erected a monument but use the place to grow potatoes and other foodstuffs.

When the area was disturbed for the installation of a pipeline, Kalinin says, the bones of the dead rose to the surface, and young people from around the area employed “the human skulls” as footballs in their games.

Disgusted by what he found there, Kalinin challenged local officials as to how they could allow that to happen. The answer of one was chilling: “Every piece of our land is full of blood, so what do you want us to do? Set up memorials everywhere? Then where would we be? Not only without any potatoes but also without any bread.”

The “Gudok” journalist said that he had initially supposed that as a result of wars and repression, “human life had become devalued, [that] death had become an everyday thing” and that “not only the rites and mysteries of burial had been devalued but even the remains of those who have died.”

But in the course of his investigation, he continued, he recognized that something even worse had occurred. “Cemeteries are needed not so much for the dead as for the living,” and consequently, the devaluation of the dead represented a devaluation of living, indeed of life itself.

Kalinin leaves no doubt as to whom he blames for this: the Communist system. He quotes a “dictionary of atheism” from the Soviet period: “Death is the end of the life of an organism, as a result of which his individual existence ceases. Science considers death as a natural process. True immortality is to be found in the deeds of man who leaves his mark in life.”

“By asserting that the human being is finite, the former ideology promoted a limited interest in it,” Kalinin writes. And Russians today, “the product of that campaign,” he continues, “are reaping today what [they] did not sow” – “a denial of the moral essence of death” and hence “a denial of the moral essence of life itself.”

Militant atheism, he suggests, may have reduced the fear of some of death, but it gave birth to another kind of fear, one that has proved more destructive: a fear “not before conscience but before physical emptiness.” And that fear caused Soviet officials to seek to immortalize themselves by giving their names to cities, streets and so on.

It even produced what could be called “nomenklatura cemeteries,” the “Gudok” author says. Every country has cemeteries for its heroes, “but in other countries this process takes place under the control of society.” In the Soviet Union, however, “even the choice of the place for a last rest became a privilege” granted by the powers that be.

Following Moscow’s example, “nomenklatura alleyways” were established in other places as well, where “veterans of the party and Komsomol” were buried in Soviet times and where “Chechen war veterans, bandits and bigwigs of the shadow economy” are in like manner interred in the Russian Federation of today.

Indeed, Kalinin suggests, “cemeteries are a projection onto the world beyond the grave of our understanding about life on earth.” And consequently, at the present time, Russian cemeteries resemble nothing so much as urban high rise buildings where everyone puts something different in the window to set himself apart.

In many of these “nomenklatura” style cemeteries, the situation now resembles “a spectacle.” Instead of people walking along quiet paths, reflecting about life and death, there are “noisy excursions” whose leaders about graves as if they were some kind of “museum exhibit.”

A few years ago, Kalinin said, he visited a cemetery in the Russian city of Torez. There, where are buried a Soviet-era poet, a Hero of the Soviet Union, and numerous victims of the Afghan war, the journalist said he saw rising above all of their grave markers “the bust of the director of a restaurant.”

Such a situation, he concludes, “objectively and dispassionately shows who was who in this life,” adding “for shame.”

But there is one positive note this month on the Russian Federation’s funerary front. The city government of Moscow has agreed to the opening of a pet cemetery, the first in the Russian Federation, according to the Noviy Region 2 information agency.

The opening of this pet cemetery, the agency said, will mean that family pets “will no longer be buried in the back garden or thrown into the trash bin,” and that development in turn means that the Russian capital “finally will become one of the [world’s] civilized cities.”

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