Historic Cemeteries : Soviets Take Status to the Grave

Down by a bend in the Moscow River, next to the bulbous gilt domes of the 16th-Century Novodevichy Convent, is a long brick wall of the same vintage, fortified by squat, crenelated towers and a gate of sheet iron.

From a booth inside the gate, a uniformed policeman checks the buff identity cards of authorized visitors.

Except for a sign at the entrance that says tsvety --”flowers”--and a small state flower shop beneath it, the casual passer-by might reasonably assume that the wall encloses a military headquarters or some private hideaway in the heart of the city for the Soviet elite.

The latter guess would be close to the mark. This is Novodevichy Cemetery, one of the world’s most unusual burying grounds, and testimony to a distinctive feature of the nation that made it so: In Russia, rank is important in death, as it is in life.

Cross Section of History

For a foreigner able to slip past the guard, a walk through the closed sanctuary of Novodevichy reveals a rich cross section of Russian and Soviet history in all its grandeur, horror and banality.

Strolling past the graves beneath stands of birch and locust trees is like flipping randomly through the pages of an encyclopedia.

Great artists lie beside gray bureaucrats. Army generals, KGB chiefs and youthful test pilots share this prestigious ground with some of the administrators of Josef Stalin’s terror and a few of its victims. V.I. Lenin’s brother Dmitri, a nonentity about whom little is known, is buried here. So is an early Soviet ambassador, Alexandra Kollontay, whose relations with the Bolshevik leader were reputed to have been more than political.

Modest Grave for Chekhov

Two of Russia’s most beloved writers, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, are buried here in touchingly modest graves. Chekhov’s monument resembles a six-foot-tall model of a village church, minus the cross. Gogol’s is marked by a small bust on a pedestal.

More imposing, if less tasteful, monuments decorate the graves of men like Semyon Tsvigun, the deputy head of the KGB security and intelligence agency and a brother-in-law of former Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev. Tsvigun died in mysterious circumstances in 1982.

A bemedaled, multi-ton bronze bust of Tsvigun, who helped to crush the dissident movement in the 1970s, glowers from a black stone frame bearing a discreet inscription in gold letters: “From the KGB.”

The largest monument in Novodevichy belongs not to Nikita S. Khrushchev, who reposes beneath a modest, modernistic sculpture by an artist he once reviled in public and later, as a private pensioner, befriended, nor to Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer, whose own small slab includes a touch of whimsy: a few musical notes, the Russian equivalent of “do-re-mi,” which also correspond to the first letters of his name.

It is probably no coincidence, as Russians like to say, that Novodevichy’s biggest and seemingly most expensive monument devoted to one person commemorates the barely remembered Arseny Zverev, who served as minister of finance under Stalin and Khrushchev from 1938 to 1960.

Politburo Must Decide

“To be buried here these days requires a decision by the Politburo,” noted a Moscow woman whose distant relative, a scientist, gained the honor many years ago.

Even so, Novodevichy ranks only fourth on the list of the Soviet capital’s most prestigious places of burial. Just as the rank of Politburo members is denoted by where they stand in relation to one another, in photographs and at public appearances, rank is denoted in death by where one is buried.

The Soviet Union’s most exclusive necropolis, with only one occupant, is the granite mausoleum on Red Square containing the ostensible remains of Lenin, who died in 1924.

Whether the embalmed figure with the wispy reddish goatee displayed inside, under a thick glass box, is actually Lenin remains a matter of perpetual speculation. The hundreds of Soviet citizens bused in each day to view the body in hushed veneration--shirt collars buttoned up, hands out of pockets, no talking allowed--understand that it is best to assume that the authorities are telling the truth in this matter.

Demoted in Death

An embalmed Stalin lay alongside Lenin from 1953 until his demotion during Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization in the 1960s. Stalin’s name was erased from the front of the mausoleum, and he is now buried in the country’s second most exclusive cemetery, immediately behind the mausoleum and a few paces from the Kremlin wall. Here as well, among about a dozen graves, are Brezhnev, his successor Yuri V. Andropov, and his successor, Konstantin U. Chernenko.

So is Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat officially revered as the founder of the Chekha, the forerunner of the KGB security and intelligence agency. In Poland, there is an old joke about Dzerzhinsky that reflects popular attitudes toward the Soviet Union:

“Why do we revere him, too? Because he killed more Russians than any other Pole in history.”

The third-ranked place of burial is the Kremlin wall itself. Behind small black plaques set in the wall are the cremation urns of old Bolsheviks, young cosmonauts and marshals of the victorious Red Army whose exploits in the Great Patriotic War--World War II--are still celebrated nightly on television. Here as well are the ashes of second-rank Soviet leaders such as the late Premier Alexei N. Kosygin, and two Americans.

Americans in the Wall

One is William G. (Big Bill) Haywood, leader of the Wobblies--the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor movement in the early 1900s. The other is journalist John Reed, whose “Ten Days That Shook the World” is still a classic chronicle of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Reed died of typhus in the Soviet Union in 1920, already partly disillusioned with the new Soviet state, but honored nonetheless for his contribution to it.

But the long line of uniform black plaques conveys little of the drama, irony and poignancy to be found at Novodevichy.

In one corner of the 10-acre grounds, atop a slender white pedestal, is a sad and graceful marble likeness of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. The sculpted head is enclosed in a thick transparent plastic box, installed in recent years, according to Soviet sources, after unidentified vandals repeatedly broke off the nose.

Nearby, in “political alley,” as Muscovites call it, is her close friend, Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Stalin’s foreign minister and premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, and a dedicated Communist whom Stalin later dispatched to a Siberian labor camp, as much for her Jewish origins as her friendship with Alliluyeva. Molotov, who died last month at the age of 96, now lies next to his wife.

Striking Change in Values

Like an abrupt alteration in geological strata that marks an ancient natural cataclysm, the difference between the old czarist section of Novodevichy and the dominant Soviet part suggests a striking change in official values.

The old section is populated by revered cultural figures and the occasional nobleman. There are scientists, artists and musicians from the Soviet era as well, but among the post-revolutionary heroes they form a decided minority.

Both in numbers and the lavishness of monuments, those who predominate from 70 years of Soviet history are bureaucrats, the wives of prominent political figures and men who gave the Soviet Union its principal claim to world attention: the generals, the test pilots, the military engineers.

Along with a larger-than-life statue of a general barking orders over a field telephone, one of the odder monuments in Novodevichy belongs to Col.-Gen. Vasily Grabin, a famed designer of artillery, whose 76-millimeter anti-tank gun was rushed into production amid the German onslaught in World War II and inspired Stalin to declare that “artillery is the god of war.”

The monument is a thick slab of armor plate with three holes blasted through it.

A Curious Memorial

Novodevichy’s most curious memorial is a 50-foot bas-relief along one wall of the cemetery that depicts the tragedy of the “Maxim Gorky,” a 40-ton, six-engine giant of an airplane built in 1933 to demonstrate the putative superiority of the Soviet aircraft industry.

Equipped with a movie theater and a printing press (to issue in-flight news bulletins to passengers en route), it crashed on May 18, 1935 during a demonstration flight, killing all 11 crew members and 37 passengers.

Memorial plaques list names of the dead, note that each of the next of kin received 10,000 rubles in compensation and blame the disaster on one Blagin, the pilot of an escort plane who collided with the Gorky while thoughtlessly executing barrel-rolls around it.

Not mentioned, however, is a prominent associate of Stalin who was to have been aboard the Gorky, but was called away on urgent business moments before takeoff. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a fellow Georgian, died two years later in mysterious circumstances after a bitter argument with Stalin, who had begun systematically eliminating his rivals in 1934, a year before the crash of the Gorky.

Across the cemetery is a similar, less informative, monument to the six crew members who died when the Soviet Union’s answer to the Concorde supersonic transport crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973. The memorial contains no explanation of what went wrong aboard the TU-144, which, like the Maxim Gorky, was a prestige project that failed.

Some Resisted Honor

Difficult as it is to gain admission to the hallowed ground of Novodevichy--for the dead or the living--not everyone buried here wanted the honor.

Among those most recently interred is the great Russian opera singer Fydor Shalyapin, who left his homeland in 1921, disillusioned with the new Bolshevik regime, which had no kind words for him in return.

Shalyapin died in France in 1938. In 1984, after quiet negotiations between the Soviet and French governments, and with the consent of his son and daughter, Shalyapin’s remains were exhumed and returned in 1984 for burial at Novodevichy. A statue of the singer was unveiled at his new grave this October, at an invitation-only ceremony attended by Moscow’s cultural elite. In a further sign of his rehabilitation, Shalyapin’s former house, next to the U.S. Embassy, is being restored as a museum.

Yet his widow, Maria Valentinovna, had long ago declared that Shalyapin wanted never to return. Writing in the emigre journal “Kontinent,” the Soviet emigre conductor Mstislav Rostropovich recalled in 1984 that Shalyapin once told an interviewer: “To Russia I will not return. Enough. In Russia they smeared my snout with mustard.”

Nor are all those who are assumed to lie in Novodevichy actually here--at least not yet.

One Moscow intellectual with a pass to the cemetery, by virtue of having a family member buried there, recalls the time several years ago when he and his wife were strolling through the shaded grounds and paused by the grave of the wife of Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s closest comrade-in-arms, and a man thoroughly implicated in the terror and famine of the 1930s.

“Where do you suppose old Kaganovich himself is buried?” the man mused to his wife.

“And why,” said an elderly man, rising from a nearby bench, “should Kaganovich be buried?”

It was, of course, Kaganovich himself, said to be still alive at the age of 93.