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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
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2 HistoryWorkshopJournal
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Deathand Memoryin ModernRussia 3
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4 HistoryWorkshopJournal
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Deathand Memoryin ModernRussia 5
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6 HistoryWorkshopJournal
was given as seven million, thoughit was widely suspectedthat this was a
grossunderestimate.Khrushchevlaterinflatedthe figureto twentymillion,
the statistic, grim enough, which most of the older textbooks give as an
indication of the disproportionatelyhigh price the Soviets paid for the
collectivevictoryover fascism.In fact, however, the total appearsto have
been at least as high as twenty-eightmillion, while some currentRussian
estimatesinflatethe losses to thirty-sevenor even fortymillion.19
How did people cope with loss on this scale? What was its impact?In
othersocietiesa naturalresponsewouldhavebeen to turnto the traditional
comfortsof religionand ritual,publicor private.But here again,the Soviet
case was exceptional.The violence of the Stalinera was compoundedby a
parallel and simultaneousassault upon religious practices of all kinds,
includingthose surroundingdeath. The impactof this attackon Russian
mentalities can be understood only by considering the importance of
traditionin the years before Stalinism.Even for a pre-industrialsociety,
Russiawasrichlyendowedwithsuperstition,customandritualwhenit came
to the treatmentof deathandbereavement.20 Beliefs aboutthe relationship
between the body and the soul, and even aboutthe conditionof the corpse
itself, incorporatedpre-Christianinfluences, accretionsfrom traditional
folkloreand adaptedorthodoxideasandlanguage.Superstitionswhichhad
persistedforcenturieswerewidelyheld, affectingpracticesacrossEuropean
Russia. The rapidviolationof these wouldhave been shockingon its own.
But their more or less enforced abandonmentat a time of widespread
violencecompoundeda majorsocialcatastrophe.
In the light of what was about to happen, three principalsets of issues
stand out as particularlyimportant.First, the body itself was treatedwith
carefulreverence- washed, dressedin special garments,laid in its coffin
withan assortmentof possessionsandtokensto ease its passageto the 'other
wide'. Second, the place of burial acquired a lasting importance.The
holdingof ritualmealsat the graveside,regularvisitsto the plot, the tending
and decorationof graves- these are traditionswhich still survive.Family
members might converse with the deceased by the grave; sometimes
messageswere sent in the keepingof the recentlydead for those who had
gone long before. A sense of continuitywas preservedat the burialsite.
Cremation,whichthe Bolsheviksattemptedto reintroducein the 1920s,was
entirely alien to Russianfuneraryculture.The practicehad disappeared,
indeed, more or less at the sametime as Christianityarrivedin Kiev.
Fear of and respectfor deathwere manifestedthroughghoststoriesand
the belief thatpotentiallyvengefulspiritsmustbe appeased.The purposeof
manyof the more elaborateaspectsof funeraryritualwas to circumventthe
possibility of hauntingor other revenge. At the moment of death, for
example,doorswerelockedanda windowopenedto allowthe spiritto leave
by an unfamiliarroute, thus makingits returnto the house moredifficult.2'
The soap with which the corpse had been washed was buried in an
uncultivatedcornerof the yard,andthe waterdisposedof outsidethe house.
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Deathand Memoryin ModernRussia 7
Body and spirit were hardly separate - violations of a corpse could result in
an angry haunting.22 Whether individuals fully believed in these super-
stitions is at one level unimportant; their persistence indicates that they were
at least effective as strategies for allaying the collective anxiety about death
in a high-mortality world.
How did the Bolsheviks deal with death? Their ideology was officially
atheist. Unease about death, however, is universal. The questions of ritual
and a new Soviet language of death were raised within hours of the seizure of
power. One of the new government's first tasks was to bury the 238 heroes
who had died in the struggle for Moscow. A 'communist', atheist, funeral
ceremony had rapidly to be improvized. Quick to see the potential as well as
the challenge of the occasion, its organizers.turned it into one of the earliest
full-scale demonstrations in support of the revolution. Red Square, whch
only four years before had seen celebrations for three hundred years of the
Romanov dynasty, now hosted its first mass rally for the new regime.23
Every factory, office, and theatre in the city was closed for the occasion.
Open coffins were carried through the city to their burial place in the
Kremlin wall. The cortege was followed by a battalion of the Red Guard, its
slow progress accompanied by the ritual (and traditional) wailing of women.
Red banners fluttered from the Kremlin's battlements, their message
confirming that the deaths marked the birth of a new life, that of the
workers' and peasants' republic. The choice of ceremony, even the choice of
music and the presence of the keening women, combined the old and
familiar with elements of Communist state theatre. Open coffins, flowers,
the notion that death is necessary for the creation of new life - these were
traditional aspects of Russian funerary culture. The addition of military
guards and political slogans, neatly replacing the trappings of traditional
religion, was intended at this stage to honour the fact that the 'heroes' had
died fighting. But military ritual, and the presence of soldiers in uniform,
would become a staple of Communist obsequies thereafter, reinforcing the
idea that the new state was the product of constant struggle and sacrifice.
The hero's funeral, repeated several times in the next three years,24
would reach its high point in the pubilc obsequies for Lenin in 1924. In its
seventh year, the new regime had yet to perfect the atheist funeral; Lenin
deserved the deepest solemnities, but Communism, with its simple slogans
and direct messages of equality and consumption, could provide little that
did not smack of bathos. The choice of music, for example, was problematic.
The heroes of 1917 were buried to the strains of Internationale- less than two
weeks after the Revolution little else seemed appropriate. But the
commission which met to organize the ceremony for Lenin's interment
included men whose tastes had been formed in western Europe. They
reached instinctively for the requiem masses of Verdi and Mozart, to say
nothing of the heroic romanticism of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. Memo-
randa flew from the commission to the office of Lunacharskii, Commissar
for Education. It was the latter who discarded all the religious music,
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8 HistoryWorkshopJournal
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Death and Memory in Modern Russia 11
Even for those who died peacefully, then, Soviet power brought changes,
many of which made mourning more difficult for those who survived. For
the families of those who died violently, and for the victims of famine, the
processes of loss and mourning were disrupted beyond recognition. Written
records from the famine regions, for example, stress the appalling casual-
ness and haste of disposal. Bodies were piled up on carts and in morgues and
buried by the score - if there was anyone available to bury them - in
communal pits. Sometimes the dying were loaded on to the mortuary carts
with the dead to save a second tour of the village. Memoirs describe the
looting of bodies, thefts of clothing, and even, notably in the peculiar crisis
of the siege of Leningrad, the butchering of human flesh, which at one point
took place in the yard of a local hospital. In a culture where the dressing of
corpses played so large a part, one memoir of looting is particularly telling.
'No-one ventures to dress the dead family members in any clothes,' a
Ukrainian noted, 'as the next day they would be found at the morgue naked,
stripped of everything by unknown criminals.'42
Serious though it was, however, the violation of funerary rituals was only
the first of a series of disruptions guaranteed to compound the sorrows of the
bereaved. Individual loss can be accommodated by most societies, but
where collective trauma - and thus, social memory - is concerned, a further
stage in recovery involves remembrance, the recognition and acknow-
ledgement of death, the conferring of a certain status on the bereaved, the
construction of dignified narratives to explain the necessity and value of the
losses.43 Because the conferring of special status on the dead is linked with
national priorities and official definitions of identity, some victims of
catastrophe remain at least partially invisible. The fallen of 1920s civil war
Ireland might be an example here, or slaves who perished without record in
the days before Civil Rights. Where Soviet Russia differed from most other
cases, however, was that many memories did not merely rot but were
actively suppressed. Historical, and even personal records, were distorted to
deny their validity.
Even war deaths were recorded selectively. While the so-called Great
Patriotic War, the pivotal moment in Soviet military history, was elaborately
commemorated, First World War deaths tended to be forgotten. The
Briatsk cemetery of First World War soldiers has disappeared altogether."
There are some comparisons to be made here with the commemoration of
fallen mercenaries in Europe's early modern wars - as George Mosse points
out,45 elaborate commemorationin Western Europe only began with
citizens' militias and the idea of collective sacrifice. The First World War, as
far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, was an old regime imperialist struggle
- and perhaps their silence about it reflects their political indifferent to it as a
founding myth. More recently, official reticence about the costs and wisdom
of the Afghan war was reflected in the secrecy with which fallen soldiers
were buried, often without reference to the cause of their deaths, and often,
too, in graves deliberately separated from each other to distract public
attention from the scale of the losses.46Mass death, even in the service of the
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NOTES
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