“The corpse was perceived as an extra problem for the camp administration. Its disposal requires labor resources, which are constantly in short supply. The corpse poses a danger of infectious diseases. The corpse does not work and does not fulfill the norm."
Let us recall the peculiarities of the funeral of convicts in different eras - from the theological background of quartering and burning of corpses in the Middle Ages to the disposal of impersonal "waste" in the GULAG.
Medieval Europe and death in prison
To understand how the penitentiary system of medieval Europe differed from what we see in places of deprivation of liberty today, it is enough to turn to the classic work of the Frenchman Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish". Medieval punishment was by definition corporal and involved sophisticated torture and execution. Those who stole gold coins from the royal treasury were not assigned house arrest, but their hands were chopped off and boiled in huge cauldrons. The law, like the entire medieval state, seemed to be a continuation of the sacred "body of the king," therefore a symmetrical answer awaited its violator - physical suffering and terrible ugliness.
People with severed ears and ripped out nostrils flooded the city's criminal ghettos. In 1525 in Metz, the spinner Jean Leclair was convicted of overturning statues of saints: they pulled his arms out of his joints with hot pincers, cut off his hand, torn off his nose, and then burned him over a low fire. The accused were often "tested" by fire: it was believed that a person can endure torture only thanks to divine intervention, which is an obvious sign of his innocence. A miraculous salvation meant a complete justification - however, they rarely apologized for a mistake to the justified.
Execution and torture served not only to punish convicts. The trials entertained black people on a par with city fairs, theatrical performances and colorful carnivals. Much later, the realization will come that public executions do not turn people away from crimes, but, on the contrary, harden society.
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It is logical that they did not stand on ceremony at all with the corpses of criminals. In medieval Europe, the attitude towards death was simple. There were no hospices, hospitals and morgues: people died in the family, at home, in front of their loved ones, and sometimes just on the street. There was a lot of death around, and they treated it accordingly - as an element of private life and everyday life. People were buried in common graves, decaying corpses were kept for a long time in anticipation of good weather for burial, and exhumed for reburial. What can we say about the bodies of criminals?
Their corpses could remain at the place of execution for more than one month, demonstrating to the townspeople the direct effect of the law. In 1660, after the execution of the regicides involved in the death of Charles I, the memoirist John Evelyn wrote: “I did not see the massacre itself, but I met their remains - mutilated, hacked, stinking - when they were being carried away from the gallows in baskets on sleds”. The heads of those executed hung on the bridge over the Thames and adorned the city walls of Paris.
The bodies of criminals were often handed over to anatomical theaters by executioners, where they were publicly dissected by doctors in ceremonial robes. The audience came to such performances with whole families - a physician, like a circus magician, removed internal organs and laid them out in front of enchanted spectators. The corpses of those who broke the law were turned into visual aids for students and artists, but in addition, they were in great demand by witches and sorcerers who brewed drugs from them and made talismans.
The prisoners' bones were used for the production of "medicinal" powders and ointments. Wigs were made of hair, and perfume compositions were made of human fat. The doctor of the Sorbonne, the historian of perfumery Annick Le Gerer in his book "The Fragrances of Versailles in the 17th-18th centuries", a recipe of a certain Crollius, a disciple of the great alchemist and physician Paracelsus, who advised to enhance the composition by all means using the body of a red-haired young man who died a violent death. The 17th century French chemist and pharmacist Nicolas Lefebvre recommended that his students use the meat of young executed prisoners for the preparation of medicines. In European cities, there were entire markets for the sale and resale of the corpses of the executed.
The dead bodies, unclaimed by the market, were quickly buried far beyond the fences of city cemeteries. They were buried in mass graves and, of course, without any monuments. Criminals could not lie in the same land with pious Christians.
Execution, prison and funeral in Russia - from medieval Russia to 1917
Despite all the controversy about whether Russia is Europe or not, a person who ended up in medieval Russia would note a complete similarity - at least in terms of the attitude towards the criminal and his body. Robbers, thieves and other "dashing people" in Russia were also boiled in cauldrons, burned and impaled, and the bodies were used to intimidate the people and other household needs. Moreover, according to a number of historians, the death penalty came to Russia from the Byzantine Empire.
The Pskov letter of judgment of 1467 names five crimes for which the accused faces death: the temple tatba (theft from the church), the horse tatba (horse stealing), betrayal (treason), ignition (arson) and theft committed for the third time. In fact, the death penalty was used much more widely. According to the Code of Laws of 1497, “led dashing people”, murderers of their master, traitors, “traitors to cities”, church and city shashi (thieves), lighters, who made a false denunciation were subject to death. The Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1649) already mentions about 60 crimes punishable by death.
It is fair to say that the death penalty in Russia for a long time remained a less common phenomenon than in Europe. There was a system of fines - buy-out. There was also a semblance of a prison, more like a log grave - a hole was dug in the ground, the walls were lined with wood, and a miniature house roof was erected on top. There the prisoners awaited trial and punishment. It was in such an earthen blockhouse that the famous Old Believer saint Archpriest Avvakum was kept for several years - however, later the preacher was burnt in the same blockhouse.
In the earthen pits, prisoners often died from lack of air, cold or poisoning with their own sewage. Over time, the functions of prisons increasingly shifted to the towers and dungeons of monasteries.
The bodies of dashing people could remain at the place of execution for a long time. We have received a letter dated August 2, 1696 to the Novotorzhsky voivode with a reprimand for not removing two corpses of criminals who were hanged on June 18 from the gallows. In 1610, the Berezovsky voivode, only three years after being hanged, at the request of the relatives of the executed, requested permission in Moscow to remove the bodies of the Ostyak rebels from the gallows.
The story of the execution and burning of the corpse of Yemelyan Pugachev is noteworthy. He was first beheaded, and then quartered, and the body parts were put on public display. It was in this sequence that the humanism of Empress Catherine II manifested itself - to kill, and only then to dismember an already insensitive body: for comparison, Stepan Razin was first cut off his hands, and then his head. A little later, all of Pugachev's remains were burned, and his ashes were scattered. The bodies were often burned along with the scaffold on which the execution was performed; often execution by burning was applied to people who committed a religious crime. The destruction of the body had a dogmatic meaning: the criminal was deprived of the chance for resurrection, and therefore - and eternal life. Some of the bodies were fed to dogs.
Usually, the corpses of prisoners from prison were taken to the "squalid houses" on the outskirts of the city and buried together with the dead without repentance, apostates and suicides. Buried in one day, in bulk, all at once. As a rule, the burial took place on Trinity Thursday after the general funeral service. Someone from those in power was also present at the service - making sure that the criminals were not accidentally buried close to the church. The bodies piled up in great numbers; This was until one day, passing by the Moscow Bozhedomka (now Dostoevsky Street), Tsarina Elizaveta Petrovna felt a terrible stench and ordered to cancel a single day of funeral for criminals.
The death penalty became especially widespread under Peter I - but after him this type of punishment gradually fell out of use. Already a hundred years later, under Alexander I, no more than 80 people were executed per year in the entire vast Russian Empire. Punishment in the form of death was prescribed in the most extreme cases when it came to an encroachment on power. The most massive and high-profile executions of the 19th century were the hanging of the Decembrists and Narodnaya Volya terrorists.
The burial place of the executed Decembrists is unknown. Petersburg rumor said that they were either drowned in the cold waters of the Gulf of Finland, or secretly buried on the deserted island of Golodai. It is known that Ekaterina Bibikova, sister of the executed Decembrist Sergei Muravyov-Apostol, asked to give her brother's body, but Nicholas I replied with a resolute refusal. Urban legends still associate Golodai Island with the hanged Decembrists.
A somewhat better fate awaited the body of the Narodnaya Volya. They were often buried in the old Preobrazhensky cemetery. True, they were buried in secret. Here is what the cemetery caretaker Valerian Grigorievich Sagovsky told about the funeral of the executed First Martyrs - conspirators who prepared and executed the attempt on Alexander II on March 1, 1881: “On the eve of the execution on April 2, 1881, a bailiff of the Alexander Nevsky part of the city of St. civilian and ordered to hastily prepare a common grave for five coffins in a remote corner of the cemetery. He promised to deliver the document for this grave tomorrow. In the far corner of the cemetery in the wasteland, the gravediggers dug a deep hole on the same day …
He informed me that they had brought five coffins with regicides for the funeral, who were executed in St. Petersburg, on the Semenovsky parade ground. I'm used to funeral matters. But then goose bumps ran through my body. I did not have to bury those executed, and, moreover, with the observance of such secrecy and without any funeral rites …
They brought boxes with the bodies of the executed to the grave and began to lower them. The boxes were so bad, so hastily knocked down that some of them broke on the spot. The box in which lay the body of Sophia Perovskaya broke. She was dressed in a teak dress, in the same one in which she was hung, in a wadded jacket. In the same cemetery (after the revolution it will be renamed the Cemetery of Memory on January 9th - in honor of the victims of Bloody Sunday buried here), they buried those imprisoned in the Trubetskoy bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress and other revolutionaries who died in dungeons. Their graves are unknown; only an approximate burial site is indicated in the literature.
However, the echoes of medieval practices, in which the bodies of the executed and after death served to intimidate the living, are still audible: in 1878, the Odessa People's Will Ivan Kovalsky, who was shot for armed resistance during detention, was buried on a military parade ground. “Troops marched over the grave with music,” an underground newspaper of that time wrote about his funeral.
But already at the end of the 19th century, the funeral of political prisoners turned into numerous demonstrations, not only in large cities, but also in Siberia, where failed revolutionaries were exiled en masse. Such actions became the prototype of the "red funeral", a ceremony that would arise in the first years after the revolution: the deceased was dressed up in a scarlet shirt, and those who came to say goodbye to him spoke next to the coffin with fiery speeches.
Death in the Gulag: the frozen ground
It is not true that the cold and terrible GULAG began several thousand kilometers from Moscow. The islands of the "archipelago" were also within the limits of the present-day Third Transport Ring. Small camps were opened in former monasteries in the city, for example, on the Lenin Hills, where prison labor was used on construction sites.
Prisoners died often. Despite the officially low mortality rate (from 0.5% to 20% during the war years), there were an order of magnitude more deaths, as evidenced by the memories of former convicts and their diaries, in which great attention is paid to the struggle for survival - the everyday problems facing a prisoner - and only in passing is it said how they passed away. There was so much death that it became commonplace.
Reading the diaries that we found in the archives of the Memorial center, you understand: the funeral in the Gulag was viewed as waste disposal. The deceased was completely undressed in the morgue, a tag with the prisoner's number was attached to the corpse, the surname was not indicated. “The watchman on duty checked the direction for carrying the corpse into the zone with accompanying documents. Then he would take a heavy hammer on a long wooden handle and forcefully beat the deceased on the head with the words: "This is the last seal on your forehead, so that no one alive will be taken out of the zone." (Fund HRC "Memorial", Gursky, F.2, OP.3, D.18).
The corpse was perceived as an unnecessary problem for the camp administration. Its disposal requires labor resources, which are constantly in short supply. The corpse poses a danger of infectious diseases. The corpse does not work and does not fulfill the norm. “In the permafrost conditions, ammonal was needed for burials to blow up the soil for the pits. The administration of the mine did not give ammonal, citing the fact that ammonal was needed for production purposes.
Not for burials. But the camp administration protested, demanding ammonal for burial. As a result, he was given, but very little at all. Because of this and due to the negligence of the funeral team, the burial pits were very small. And in the spring, a terrible picture emerged: in many places, arms and legs were sticking out from under the snow and earth … . (HRC Memorial Foundation, Grosman A. G., F.2., OP.1, D.50).
There were no coffins, prisoners were buried in bags or simply naked, stacking bodies on top of each other. The linen was taken off without fail - after washing it was transferred to a new prisoner. The graves were shallow.
One of the former prisoners recalled how the corpses of a prisoner were laid out in a row where the new road was supposed to pass. Then the bulldozer leveled the ground and at the same time buried the bodies of the dead. The corpses were floated into the water, buried in the snow, buried in the former adits, and whole necropolises were set up like the Kommunarka near Moscow.
Death in Spring: Political Thaw and Prison Funeral after 1953
The political changes that followed Stalin's death and the condemnation of the "personality cult" also affected the conditions of detention. Within three years, several million people were released, up to 75% of prisoners received amnesty. By 1956, fewer than one million people remained in prison.
The prisoners received Stalin's death with enthusiasm; great expectations were associated with her. But not everyone was released. The commissions reviewing the cases were in no hurry; uprisings broke out in some camps, which were quickly suppressed. The prisoners killed during the riots were buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers. Thus, the Norilsk prisoners, who had raised a camp uprising in the summer of 1953, were buried at the foot of Mount Schmidt. There were 500 of them.
During the times of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the attitude towards the prisoner's body became much more humane. The distant camps of the GULAG were disbanded, and colonies replaced them. The dead began to be given out for burial to relatives or buried in neighboring cemeteries, in specially designated places. Coffins appeared; as a prerequisite, registration of the deceased was introduced with an indication of the place of burial. The dead have found their graves.
In post-Soviet Russia, relatives of the deceased in places of imprisonment are required to notify of his death within 24 hours. During this time, the body must be prepared for delivery and transportation. If the relatives refuse the body, or the former prisoner did not have one, he is buried at the expense of the FSIN "in a specially designated place" in the cemetery. The appearance of the grave and the prisoner's burial clothes are regulated by departmental documents; a plate is installed at the burial site, from which you can find out who is buried here. The number of the grave is entered in the archive file of the convict.