Donskoy cemetery

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Cemetery entrance

The Donskoy Cemetery ( Russian Донское кладбище ) is a ten-hectare cemetery in Moscow . It should not be confused with the nearby old cemetery of Donskoy Monastery , which is often referred to as the Old Donskoy Cemetery ( Старое Донское кладбище ).

history

Collective graves for war victims

The Donskoy Cemetery, south of central Moscow, was built towards the end of the 19th century as an extension of the (old) monastery cemetery, which had been a coveted burial site in the previous centuries and was therefore fully occupied. On the site of the new cemetery, a church building belonging to the Donskoy monastery was erected in 1914, which was given unusually large cellars with space for up to forty families . This architectural peculiarity of the church was decisive for its later use.

When the Donskoy Monastery was dissolved after the October Revolution in 1917 and its sacred buildings were used for other purposes, the church in the new Donskoy Cemetery was converted into Moscow's first crematorium in the early 1920s , as its basement offered enough space for an incinerator. This crematorium was completed in early 1927 and inaugurated in October 1927 on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It operated until the mid-1970s and was the only crematorium in Moscow up to that time. Here, among other things, all prominent revolutionaries and politicians who received an urn grave of honor in the necropolis on the Kremlin wall were cremated. There are also numerous urns of victims of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, all of whom were cremated here, and mass graves containing the ashes of victims of World War II .

The cemetery itself was mainly used as an urn cemetery until the 1970s; Most of the urns were not placed in earth graves, but in one of the numerous columbaria in the cemetery walls or in the crematorium building. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the former crematorium building was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1990s and turned back into a place of worship.

Graves of prominent people

Individual graves

Well-known people who are buried here in individual graves include:

Mass graves

Mass grave No. 1

Numerous anonymous mass graves with the ashes of victims of the Second World War and the Stalinist purges of the 1930s can be found in the Donskoy cemetery. According to the Russian human rights organization Memorial , around 7,000 people were shot dead in Butyrka alone after the Second World War until Stalin's death in 1953 , and their ashes were thrown into mass graves by buckets. According to Memorial, mass grave No. 3 contains the ashes of 927 German citizens who were executed in the Soviet Union between 1950 and 1953 as victims of Stalinist violence.

The ashes of the following executed people were buried in a mass grave :

See also

literature

  • Jurij Ryabinin: Žizn 'moskovskich kladbišč . RIPOL Klassik, Moscow 2006, ISBN 5-7905-4845-8 , pp. 335–359
  • Arsenij Roginskij , Jörg Rudolph, Frank Drauschke, Anne Kaminsky (eds.): "Shot in Moscow ..." The German victims of Stalinism in the Moscow Donskoye cemetery 1950–1953. 3rd completely revised edition. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-14-7 . (Research results of a joint research project by Memorial International Society for Historical Enlightenment, Human Rights and Social Welfare , Moscow, Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship , Berlin, and Facts & Files - Historical Research Institute Berlin ; see also berlin.de (pdf, 3 MB) )
  • Jörg Rudolph, Frank Drauschke, Alexander Sachse (2007): Executed in Moscow. Victims of Stalinism from Berlin 1950-1953 , series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Volume 23 ( online (pdf, 136 pages))

Web links

Commons : Donskoy Cemetery  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Karl Schlögel : The Soviet Century. Archeology of a Lost World , pp. 533-542. CHBeck 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-71511-2 , pages 533-542: A “Temple of Modernity” - the crematorium .

Coordinates: 55 ° 42 ′ 44.3 ″  N , 37 ° 36 ′ 8.6 ″  E