New approaches to cemetery design and the search for new forms of funeral rites in the USSR in the post-war period

The aim of the study is to identify new approaches to cemetery design in the USSR in the post-war period. The transformation of government policy in the field of funeral business and mourning rites is traced; periods and new directions in it are determined. The author analyzed regulatory documents (instructions, provisions) and standard projects regulating the construction and operation of cemeteries after 1945, conducted field research with visits to cemeteries, photographing surviving examples of Soviet mortal architecture. The Great Patriotic War had a strong impact on the funeral industry in the USSR in several aspects: (1) comprehensive measures were taken to improve cemeteries and restore order in the funeral industry; (2) the process of creating specialized trusts and bureaus throughout the country that dealt with all issues related to burials was accelerated; (3) military burials were placed under special control, and standard monuments for individual and mass graves of military personnel and partisans were developed; (4) the very concept of the arrangement of civil cemeteries, where war veterans were also buried, was revised. The study concluded that since 1946 the authorities had moved away from the utilitarian approach to cemeteries and began to view them as a platform for the introduction of socialist rituals. It is noted that, despite all the efforts and a large number of instructions adopted during this period, the funeral rite remained the least developed and "problematic", which is largely due to the fact that the attitude towards death in society and traditional burial practices remained the most conservative layer of culture. The development of a secular funeral ritual dragged on until 1979. Much faster, new approaches to the design of cemeteries were introduced, which now had to have central courtyards and wide alleys for funeral processions, new types of mortal architecture (pavilions for funeral meetings, funeral sites, halls for farewell ceremonies, Houses of Mourning), which replaced cemetery churches. In the development of new approaches to cemetery design, the period 1946-1956 should be highlighted, when the first pavilions for funeral assemblies (mortuaries) in the architectural style of the "Stalinist Empire" and externally similar to temples and pantheons were developed and implemented. They were supposed to have a burial rite that had common features with the Christian requiem and national traditions, but in a socialist performance. For the first time, the author identified two more Mortuaries in addition to the Volzhsky, the most famous (the only one to have survived): in Moscow, at the Kuzminsk and Golovlevsk cemeteries (which did not survive). All three Mortuaries were built between 1949 and 1956. It was proven that Mortuaries did not become widespread because during the next period of the Khrushchev thaw and the Brezhnev era, from 1957 onwards, more utilitarian mourning sites began to be introduced en masse, for which the farewell ceremony was supposed to be simpler. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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