Abstract
What happens to corpses produced by armed conflicts? This question may seem simple: most bodies are buried, more or less quickly, in mass graves. However, the time between death and the moment when the human remains are inhumed deserves to be studied. This article focuses on the situation in the Urals at the end of the Civil War (1918–1919). The fights between the Bolsheviks and their opponents resulted in many casualties. The Bolsheviks gave a fundamental, and rather unusual, importance to the bodies of ‘their’ dead and attached a specific political significance to them. They developed a politics of corpses, using them in public space to assert their power. The bodies of dead Red fighters were brought back to symbolic places, resulting in impressive public funerals across the city of Yekaterinburg in 1918. Their burial sites became contested territories, protected by the authorities but derided by their opponents. After their final victory in 1919, Bolsheviks displayed their dead as proof of the cost of their struggle. Mutilated bodies were shown to carry the stigmata of sacrifice. The inventory and identification of victims became a central and immediate requirement. Inquiry commissions questioned witnesses and looked for mass burials and abandoned corpses. Mass graves were searched, cadavers exhumed and made visible. The public use of corpses was, however, not limited to identification purposes. The display of dead bodies, which is not unusual in Orthodox culture, took on a special political dimension. There was mass dissemination of the sight of death through these public monuments and the use of photography. We must especially stress the topographical importance of the displayed death: the exhumed bodies were used to tell of victory, to make control of the territory explicit. The memorialisation of some mass graves completed the process. In Yekaterinburg, but also in more distant localities, monuments were erected. They were meant to materialise the sacrifice of so-called ‘communards’ and the peculiar place of the Civil War in the narrative of the new Bolshevik regime, honouring the memory of the dead and mobilising the living.
Highlights
What happens to corpses produced by armed conflicts? This question may seem simple: most bodies are buried, more or less quickly, in mass graves
“Bare your head, workers of the Urals! Today we honour the bright memory of the Ural communards who fell in the struggle for the triumph of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution!” 1 On 3 August 1919, Ural’skiy Rabochiy, the newspaper of the Yekaterinburg Communist Party regional
The whole issue was made up of articles singing the praises of activists and fighters like Ivan Malyshev, shot by the enemies of the Bolsheviks in June 1918, Leonid Vainer, who died during the fighting a month later, and Yakov Sverdlov, one of the main actors in the revolution in the Urals who died in Moscow from the Spanish flu on 16 March 1919
Summary
From October 1917 to July 1919, Bolshevik positions were very fragile in the Urals, as in most of the country. At the end of January and at the beginning of April, the bodies of Red fighters who had died in the fights against Dutov were shown and buried with pomp in the city Both ceremonies constituted more than political mourning: the Bolshevik “politics of corpses” [Fureix, p. A temporary monument was erected but bore no names, only a verse (Sleep Combat Eagles) from a poem written by Konstantin Olenin 7 in memory of the soldiers of the Russo-Japanese War, which became a popular song with music by Ivan Kornilov 8 This symbolic demonstration of force was meant to mask, or to compensate for, the fragility of the Bolshevik hold on the city. More the priests Borodintsev, Belaev, and Miropolski. On the events of Kasli, see: [Вебер, c. 106–108]
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