Abstract
The article discusses the history of the introduction of cremation in the USSR in the context of funeral culture secularization processes. In the Western European context, as in Russia before the revolution, the legalization and spread of cremation was significantly limited by the enormous influence of the Church, which traditionally opposed this new type of burial. In the USSR, after the Decree on the separation of the church from the state, a unique situation developed in which all decisions regarding the disposal of dead bodies were made directly by the civil authorities, based mainly on considerations of sanitation and hygiene in large cities. However, as it turned out when building the first crematorium in Petrograd, the main focus when choosing a project and place of construction was “creating the necessary spiritual mood among the masses,” and the building itself was called the Crematorium-Church. Thus, despite the radical change in the “control over dead bodies” (Walter) and the transition of the monopoly on burial from the Church to a deliberately secular state, the ideologists of cremation in the Soviet Russia continued to tend to a quasi-religious design for the new funeral practice. However, by the second half of the 1920s, when the Donskoy crematorium was being built in Moscow, the attitude to cremation as a technology turned out to be much more important, and the crematorium no longer fit into the quasi-religious, but into the technological framework. References Bartel, G. 1925. Krematsiia [Cremation]. Moscow: MKH. Beliakova, E. 2004. Tserkovnyi sud i problemy ttserkovnoi zhizni [Church Court and the Problems of Church Life]. Moscow: Kul’turnyi tsentr «Dukhovnaia literatura». Black, M. 2015. Smert’ v Berline. Ot Veimarskoi respubliki do razdelennoii Germanii [Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany]. Moscow: NLO. Bremborg, A. 2006. Professionalization without Dead Bodies: The Case of Swedish Funeral Directors. Mortality 11 (3): 270–285. Chukovskii, K.I. 1991. Dnevniki (1901–1929) [Diaries (1901–1929)]. Мoscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Goody, J., and C. Poppi. 1994. Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo and Italian Cemeteries. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36: 146–175. Jupp, P.C. 2006. From Dust to Ashes: Cremation and the British Way of Death. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan-Magomedov, S. 1996–2001. Arhitektura sovetskogo avangarda [Architecture of the Soviet Avantgarde], 2 vols. Moscow: Stroiizdat. Laderman, G. 2003. Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Merridale, C. 2002. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. New York: Viking Penguin Books. Prothero, S.R. 2001. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Shkarovskii, M. 2006. Stroitel’stvo Petrogradskogo (Leningradskogo) krematoriia kak sredstvo bor’by s religiei [Construction of the Petrograd (Leningrad) Crematorium as a Means of Struggling Against Religion]. Klio 3: 158–159. Sloane, D. 1991. The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sokolova, A.D. 2018. Novyi mir i staraia smert’: sud’ba kladbishh v sovetskih gorodah 1920–1930-h godov [New World and Old Death: The Fate of Cemeteries in Soviet Cities of the 1920-1930s]. Neprikosnovennyj zapas 1 (117): 74–94. Suzuki, H. 2000. The Price of Death, the Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trompette, P. 2011. Political Exchanges in the French Funeral Market. Management & Organizational History 6 (1): 13–35. Trompette, P. 2013. The Politics of Value in French Funeral Arrangements. Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (4): 373–374. Walter, T. 2005. Three Ways to Arrange a Funeral: Mortuary Variation in the Modern West. Mortality 10 (3): 173–192. Walter, T. 2012. Why Different Countries Manage Death Differently: A Comparative Analysis of Modern Urban Societies. The British Journal of Sociology 63 (1): 123–145. Zudin, I.I., K. Malkovskii, and P. Shalashov. 1929. Melochi zhizni [Little Things of Life]. Leningrad.
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