Mourning for the victims: Leningrad memorial cemeteries

• Russian Studies research seminar

Speaker: Dr François-Xavier Nérard (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Venue: Muirhead Tower, Room 122

There are two ‘memorial cemeteries’ in Saint Petersburg with very different but intertwined histories. Both of them correspond to sites of mass graves. Piskarevo Memorial Cemetery is where the dead of the Siege of Leningrad were buried. It was inaugurated in 1960. Levashovo Memorial Cemetery, opened in 1989, is the resting place of some of the victims of the Stalinist repression of 1937-1938. I will try to think about these places in terms of monuments and memorialization, but also study the way people act when visiting these places, giving different meanings to monuments.