Crematorium-Church, or Cremation in the Soviet Burial Ritual in 1920-s

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2020-49-1/209-224

Abstract

The article discusses the history of the introduction of cremation in the USSR in the context of funeral culture secularization processes. In the Western European context, as in Russia before the revolution, the legalization and spread of cremation was significantly limited by the enormous influence of the Church, which traditionally opposed this new type of burial. In the USSR, after the Decree on the separation of the church from the state, a unique situation developed in which all decisions regarding the disposal of dead bodies were made directly by the civil authorities, based mainly on considerations of sanitation and hygiene in large cities. However, as it turned out when building the first crematorium in Petrograd, the main focus when choosing a project and place of construction was “creating the necessary spiritual mood among the masses,” and the building itself was called the Crematorium-Church. Thus, despite the radical change in the “control over dead bodies” (Walter) and the transition of the monopoly on burial from the Church to a deliberately secular state, the ideologists of cremation in the Soviet Russia continued to tend to a quasi-religious design for the new funeral practice. However, by the second half of the 1920s, when the Donskoy crematorium was being built in Moscow, the attitude to cremation as a technology turned out to be much more important, and the crematorium no longer fit into the quasi-religious, but into the technological framework.

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