Moscow Cemetery to Reopen Gates

The capital’s Novodevichy cemetery, the most prestigious burial place in the Soviet Union after the Kremlin, will reopen its gates to the general public this year, the newspaper Trud reported over the weekend.

Novodevichy was closed in the mid-1970s after crowds began flocking to a monument built at the grave of former Kremlin leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Khrushchev, who was ousted from power in 1964 and died seven years later, is just one of numerous celebrated Russians buried at the cemetery.

The graves of writers Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol and composer Dmitri Shostakovich lie amid stately pines beneath the golden domes of the adjacent 16th-Century Novodevichy convent.