Burial sites of Russian soldiers in Carpathia during the First World War

The article reconstructs the centennial retrospective of the formation and the current state of the WWI Russian military necropolis in Carpathia (the territory of the modern Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine) and shows the attitude to it of the Rusins, who largely determined this process under various political regimes. After the bloody battles of 1914-1918, there appeared a dense network of individual and group burials of Russian and other army soldiers in the region. Most graves were on fields, in forests, in military cemeteries and separate sections of rural and urban graveyards. In the interwar period, when the territory of the province was controlled by Poland, some remnants of soldiers were transferred to church cemeteries. However, in the Soviet times, most graves of “tsarist soldiers” were destroyed. The modern Russian necropolis in Subcarpathia dated to the Great War has two main groups of burials: a common one for the soldiers of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies (about 25 burials) and a separate section for the soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army (up to 10 burials). The article characterises them in terms of the number of buried people and location, with the focus on the activity of civic organisations aimed at finding new burial sites and arranging the burial sites of the WWI soldiers.

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