The National and Confessional Diversity of the Population in the Soviet Projects and Documents Regulating Burial

Abstract

This article examines how issues of national and confessional diversity of the country were reflected and resolved in Soviet official documents concerning the funerary sphere. Analysis of such sources as decrees, rules, instructions, regulations and their projects concerning cemeteries and funerals demonstrates that their discourse and content reflected approaches in national politics, changes in the economic course, and objective and subjective conditions at different stages of the country’s history. Methodologically, the issues considered are included in the research contexts of the history of national politics, imperial history, economic history, and the history of Soviet social engineering. Until the end of the Great Patriotic War, despite state-proclaimed atheism and anti-religious campaigns, a targeted elimination of denominational cemeteries was not seriously considered in the context of the campaigns. Rather, their disappearance was a result of growth and redevelopment of cities and, consequently, the “relocation” of cemeteries from the centre to the outskirts and the emergence of new cemeteries. The latter were arranged without considering the national-confessional principle and were often called “international”, which emphasised their difference from the former denominational cemeteries. The emergence of a project in 1946 which divided burial space according to the denominational principle, in fact, proposed the establishment of denominational cemeteries and reflected changes in national policy from the 1930s, i.e. the strengthening of power-state and nationalist tendencies. However, this too radical an approach for state atheism was mitigated in Soviet documents of the late 1940s — 1970s concerning the burial sphere: they recommended to consider “national” customs with regard to the funerary issue and burial space with the prevalence of quasi-secular “clean” form of Sovietness. As the analysis of the 2014–2017 bill demonstrates, the confessional criterion is in demand in Post-Soviet time again as very significant for differentiating burial space and the national and confessional diversity of the population.