The Great War in Russian Memory

1 Introduction · The Great War in Russian Memory

1 Q Introduction• TheGreatWar inRussianMemory The Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery (also known as the All-­Russian War Cemetery) was one of the most visible war memorials created in imperial Russia during World War I (figure 1.1).1 First proposed by the Grand Duchess Elisaveta Fedorovna, it was organized by prominent Moscow civic leaders and dedicated with great solemnity and fanfare in the village of Vsekhsviatskoe on the outskirts of Moscow on February 15, 1915. The architect of the cemetery , P. I. Klein, directly linked the site to civic, national, and patriotic goals: he hoped that “future generations will here learn love of the motherland and will carry away in their hearts the steadfast resolution to serve for the benefit of the fatherland.”2 These national goals were to be realized through an Orthodox Christian religious idiom of memorialization. First a temporary chapel was erected at the cemetery in 1915; then the prominent architect A. V. Shchusev’s memorial Church of the Transfiguration was consecrated three years later. The cemetery eventually held 17,500 dead from World War I, including Allied troops and enemy prisoners of war. After revolutionary disturbances began in 1917, ten thousand of the revolution’s victims (both Reds and Whites) were also interred in the cemetery. Buried together with the World War I dead of several nations were revolutionaries killed by tsarist troops in March 1917, cadets from Moscow military schools who fought against the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Soviet Civil War commanders, and victims of the Red terror executed by the Soviet secret police.3 Klein’s hope that the site would instill pa­ trio­ tism in future generations was not fulfilled. In 1925 burials in the cemetery ceased, its administrative offices 2 Q The Great War in Russian Memory were closed, and it was turned into a park. Relatives of the dead no longer knew where to turn to request permission to repair graves or erect monuments, and gradually the graves began to “fall into decline and lose their inscriptions.” Soon, no one knew where to find the graves of their relatives or of the revolutionary martyrs buried in the cemetery. Openly abandoning their responsibility for the upkeep of the cemetery, Moscow city authorities enlisted the help of a voluntary organization, the Old Moscow Society, to “take the graves of outstanding public figures under its protection.”4 The society, which likely included relatives of those buried in the cemetery, protected the site to the best of its abilities. But, before it ceased meeting in 1929, when the Soviet government disbanded many voluntary societies, it had been unable to obtain 10,000 rubles from the Sokol district soviet to build a fence around the cemetery that would protect it from the students of a nearby school.5 Deprived of both civic and financial support, the cemetery was left to its fate. figure 1.1. Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery. From S. V. Puchkov, Moskovskoe gorodskoe bratskoe kladbishche (Moscow: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1915). Introduction Q 3 Information about the destruction of the cemetery is shrouded in urban legend. According to the testimony of some local residents, the All-­Russian War Cemetery was desecrated and “neighboring urchins . . . played football with skulls that they dug up from the ground.”6 The grave markers were supposedly destroyed in 1932 on Stalin’s personal orders.7 In another account, it was the building of the Moscow metro that precipitated the cemetery’s de­ struc­ tion, and afterward, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) used the site to execute and bury victims of Stalin’s purges.8 What is certain is that sometime in the 1930s or 1940s, the Church of the Transfiguration and all monuments and grave markers were demolished, with the exception of one. The unique exception to this general destruction was a monument to ­ Sergei Aleksandrovich Shlikhter, a Moscow University student who was wounded at Baranovichi on June 20, 1916, during the Brusilov offensive and died on June 25, 1916. The monument mixed the personal and the political. Inscribed on a sculpted stone tablet in new orthography was a quotation from his war diary: “How good is life. How good it is to live.”9 On the base of the monument were also inscribed the words “To a victim of the imperialist war.” While the first inscription pointed to the irony of war taking the life of this particular exuberant young man, the second inscription set...