Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
As anthropologists, historians, and devout believers know, the dead are never silent. Their unceasing voices clamor for justice, for vengeance, and above all for remembrance. Also, their agendas often just happen to track well with those of the powers-that-be. In short, the dead are both mirror of and window into the desires, anxieties, and demands of the living. Given its extraordinary twentieth-century strife, this seems especially true of Russia. Zuzanna Bogumił and Tatiana Voronina explore the development and sociopolitical ramifications of post-Soviet Russia's commemoration of the dead in their aptly titled and informative More Than Alive. Through what they term a "bricolage" multidisciplinary research methodology that folds in archival work, subject interviews, Religious Studies, Death and Dying Studies, and other fields, the authors in effect resurrect (so to speak) Ernest Becker's "science of man," much discussed in his canonical The Denial of Death. Building on the work of historians like Catherine Merridale (Night of Stone) and Nina Tumarkin (The Living and the Dead), as well as that of anthropologists like Katherine Verdery (The Political Lives of Dead Bodies), all of whom examine death in Russia/Eastern Europe, Bogumił and Voronina describe a widespread "orthodoxization of memory" in post-Soviet Russia. This orthodoxization began as early as perestroika and was specifically premised on the commemoration of the Soviet dead. In Part I of the book, the authors lay out their argument. After a glasnost-era discovery and exhumation of mass graves which held the remains of those repressed during the Stalin era, the public sought a non-Soviet means of honoring the victims. The Soviet leadership had in fact struggled to formulate its own atheist policies on burial and funerary ritual at least since the death of Lenin in 1924. Their solution in that case—state-of-the-art embalmment and perpetual display in a ziggurat-like crypt—grotesquely fused science and religious veneration (see Ilya Zbarsky's book Lenin's Embalmers). The leadership's dilemma grew still more vexed when dealing with victims the state itself had killed. Enter the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), with its age-old customs and funerary practices, rich in symbolism and reverence for what it came to call "the New Martyrs" (though that term tended to adhere mostly to the dead who had been Orthodox believers, especially priests). Church involvement in posthumous remembrance dovetailed with the grassroots efforts of groups like Memorial (founded in 1989) to bring to light the names and circumstances of those murdered by the Soviets, as well as of other victims, such as the World War II dead. In the 1990s even President Boris Yeltsin saw the ROC's framing as a useful alternative to the "Soviet meta-narrative." Indeed, these social processes had repercussions far beyond Thanatology; drawing on the work of anthropologists Jan and Aleida Assmann, Bogumił and Voronina remind us that cultural memory itself in large measure amounts to remembrance of the dead. In the tumultuous post-Soviet 1990s, the ROC's slow takeover of Russia's death commemoration industrial complex provided a sense of unity and continuity with the nation's religious past. It felt "normal," even though many had spent their lives as atheists. This takeover accelerated under Putin. Bogumił and Voronina paint a penetrating portrait of the ROC in this era, examining it as community, social organization, and hierarchical organization embroiled in state politics. In fact, one of More Than Alive's many fascinating observations is that an orthodoxization of memory was accompanied by a simultaneous politicization of the ROC in ways impossible under the Soviets. It is also worth noting that the authors admirably resist the reductionism of seeing in every phenomenon the influence of Putin. These processes emerged organically over the decades, as both the state and the church responded to socioeconomic change and grassroots demands (including by relatives) for commemoration of those who had "died a death not their own" (a phrase much repeated throughout the book). Part II deals with several fascinating case studies, including the FSB's 1990s handover of mass grave sites like Butovo to the ROC; the important role played by searchers (poiskoviki), who unearthed remains and agitated for memorials (some secular, some religious); new initiatives like the Returned Names center, the Garden of Memory, the Russian Armed Forces Patriot Park, and the Immortal Regiment movement; and the church's struggles to determine whom to canonize and remember—the Orthodox priests who were repressed, those who collaborated with Stalin, those who collaborated with Hitler, those who were simple laity, those who renounced their faith under torture, those of other faiths or no faith? Standout discussions include that of the tragic Nevsky Pyatachok, a small area outside Leningrad which the Soviets long contested with the Germans during the war, despite appallingly high casualties (some of which were shot by their own troops under a "no retreat" edict) and the destruction of several settlements. The site now houses the Nevskaia Dubrovka Museum and a complex of church structures, giving the remembrance of these dead a religious cast. In the twenty-first century, such areas became the object of dispute between real estate developers and those who sought to keep the land undeveloped as sacral sites. This in turn sheds light on the controversial phenomenon of "commercial searchers," those hired by land developers to declare areas "all clear" of remains—and receiving handsome fees for their work. More Than Alive is an insightful and lucidly written examination of, as the authors write in their conclusion, the increasingly porous borders between the secular and the religious in contemporary Russian culture.
José Alaniz (Tue,) studied this question.