Tomsk cemeteries as city residents' memory places (end of 1919 - first half of 1941)

The article is devoted to the specifics of Tomskcemeteries in the period from late 1919 until mid - 1941 as memory places. The article is devoted to the characteristics of ancient Tomskcemeteries as inhabitants of this city's memory places (1920-1930s). The author clarifies some of the data associated with the operation ofthese cemeteries in this period, and calls some outstanding persons' graves, which are lost today. The paper also identifies the traditional andnew (Soviet) features of the content of cemeteries and attitudes of the society, due to the influence of state memory politics, socio-economicconditions in the country and the nature of the local spiritual life in the necropolis of Tomsk of the 1920-1930s. In the context of thisresearch by the memory place we mean an object of the urban environment, recording, storing and transmitting the collective memory of therelevant order or other community events and persons. Cemetery is perhaps the most traditional memory place in the Russian city of thetwentieth century. It is a topical place for a variety of relevant social groups: family, ethnic and religious, professional, etc. The authormakes the following main conclusions. In Tomsk, as in other Siberian cities (1920s-1930s), necropolis was purposefully destroyed, whichhad, in our opinion, an obvious cultural value despised by the Soviet government. It guarded only their "own" graves, and not very carefully.During this period the Local Service Public Utilities did not devote due opinion to the problems of overcrowded and neglected cemeteries.Also we can see a law of the city self-development as a "living" system, where the empty and abandoned segments (in this case graves -memory places) first become dirty and dilapidated periphery, and then are settled in and adapt to the needs of those who re-mastered them.The necropolis was also destroyed by domestic vandalism of people, who were strangers in the region, and did not perceive the oldcemetery as a memory place. But for those appreciating their old pre-revolutionary identity of Tomsk connected with the images of deartombs, the necropolis collapse became a collapse of the sacred. For these people it was the hour of such socio-political tension, when thesupernatural forces intervene in history process. The most painful in this regard was the stage of the turn of the second and third decades ofthe twentieth century. Already in the 1930s the authorities tore down the historical memory areas in Tomsk focusing on building one's ownnecropolis. It was expressed in the opening of new cemeteries and caring for the fresh graves of the "heroes" of recent years , as well as inthe fact that the newspapers publish obituaries of party workers and government officials.

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