Before the revolution there were no cemeteries in the center of Moscow. Over the centuries, Russian tsars issued special decrees, according to which it was forbidden to bury the dead "inside the city." What was the reason for this?
From burial mounds to church graveyards
The ancient Slavs arranged burials in mounds, and the remains were most often burned. With the advent of Christianity, they began to bury mainly in churches.
So, in the 60s of the last century, during excavations near the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, the oldest mass grave of the Christian era was found, probably in Moscow. The earliest graves date back to the 12th century, when the church of Demetrius of Thessalonica stood on the site of the cathedral. Presumably, it was built in 1177 where there was a mass slaughter between Muscovites and the army of the Ryazan prince Gleb, who entered into an alliance with the Polovtsians. After the wooden church was replaced by a stone one, representatives of the nobility began to be buried inside it (judging by the gold and silver artifacts), and near the temple - the rabble in birch bark coffins.
Since then, there has been a tradition: at each church a churchyard appeared, where the parishioners of this church were buried. The cemeteries were called parish, and the people called them "the fields of God." As a rule, they were small in size: there were many churches in the capital. At the same time, boyars or nobles were buried either near the church, or in stone tombs or crypts under the church building, and ordinary people were buried at the edge of the churchyard. If the tombs for the nobility were preserved for centuries, then on top of the poor graves, after two or three generations, new ones were arranged.
Royal decrees
According to the author of the book “History of Moscow cemeteries. Under the roof of eternal silence "Yu. V. Ryabinin, by a decree of 1657, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich forbade to arrange burials in the Kremlin and Kitai-Gorod, while ordering to expand the number of cemeteries in the settlements. He was worried about the proximity of the graves to the city center. And the point here was, most likely, not in the "energy of death", as some researchers believe, but in the fear of unsanitary conditions.
The order of Peter I in 1723 read: "In Moscow and other cities, dead human bodies, except for noble persons, cannot be buried inside the city." In addition, in an even earlier decree from 1722 it was said: “To lower the gravestones at churches and monasteries on a level with the ground; make inscriptions on stones from above; which stones are inconvenient to place, to use them in a church building”. According to the historian Sergei Shokarev, the author of Moscow in the 18th century, the impetus for this was the funeral of Prince Caesar F. Yu. Romodanovsky, held in 1717 at the St. George Monastery. The king drew attention to the fact that the tombstones interfere with the passage of the troops who participated in the funeral procession.
But if the decree on the tombstones was still being executed, then the decree "not to bury" inside the castle after the death of the emperor was forgotten.
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Meanwhile, the daughter of Peter the Great, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, who lived in the Golovinsky Palace on the Yauza, often had to travel from the German settlement to the Kremlin and back. And often along the way she came across funeral processions. This unnerved the empress, and in 1748 she issued a decree according to which it was forbidden for funeral processions to defile along the streets stretching from the Kremlin to the imperial residence: Nikolskaya, Ilyinka, Myasnitskaya, Staraya and Novaya Basmannaya. And the cemeteries at the temples were ordered to be liquidated altogether during the empress's journey.
As a result, the dead began to be buried in remote parishes. And in 1750, on the outskirts of Moscow, near Maryina Roshcha, the first citywide cemetery appeared. They began to call him Lazarevsky, since the church standing there was consecrated in honor of Lazar.
Despite this, many Muscovites by hook or by crook tried to bury their deceased in their "native" parishes, and not far away. Bribes were used to clerks. And only thanks to strict control by the church authorities, this practice stopped.
The aftermath of the plague
1771 was marked by a large-scale plague epidemic, which, according to the historian M. I. Pyliaev, the Turks brought it to Russia.
The epidemic claimed up to 800 people a day. For more than a year in Moscow, 200,000 people died from the plague - a significant part of the population. Pylyaev writes: "The picture of the city was terrifying - the houses were empty, unburied corpses lay in the streets, the gloomy funeral ringing of bells, the screams of children abandoned by their relatives were heard everywhere …"
The dead were buried behind the Kamer-Kollezhsky shaft. But after the epidemic subsided, many graves were abandoned, as the mortality rate decreased. Only 11 Moscow cemeteries remained in operation - Dorogomilovskoye, Vagankovskoye, Miusskoye, Pyatnitskoye, Kalitnikovskoye, Danilovskoye, Rogozhskoye, Preobrazhenskoye, Vvedenskoye, Lazarevskoye and Semenovskoye, which were then outside the city limits. They became the main burial places for Moscow residents. On the parish graveyards, located within the city, they stopped burying altogether, and the church lands began to be bought out and used for building. City-wide cemeteries were no longer considered parish, but state cemeteries and were controlled by the authorities.
Today, many of the suburban cemeteries are within the city limits. And after the revolution, the Bolsheviks introduced the tradition of burying the most prominent political figures right next to the Kremlin wall. Not to mention the Mausoleum …
Irina Shlionskaya