Svetlana Malysheva has written another fine book on the public culture of early Soviet Russia. Na miru krasna is an analysis of the public expressions and political uses of death in theory and practice. Her main argument is that Bolshevik Russia developed a culture of death that excluded personal death rituals from public space and did not permit Russian people to process grief together as a national community. Russian culture today suffers from this Soviet legacy, which has prevented Russians from achieving a shared healing after a century of trauma, unlike Europeans who were able to deal publicly with the mass suffering left in the wake of the world wars. “The indifference of state, society, and people to graves and burial places,” she writes, “long ago became realities of the Soviet and Russian culture of death” (19).
Malysheva uses an anthropological method that leans on Freud's insight that death rituals are part of a process of “working through grief” (6). Her focus is on the public appearance of death, that is, how death is presented in rituals, philosophical contemplation, and print discourse, as well as funerary architecture and practices. Through the process of mourning, individuals “exclude death” from life and thus continue to live with less fear of death. Death rituals, in other words, are not for remembering the dead but for consoling the living. In the Soviet Union, however, public expressions of death and mourning were instrumentalized by the Bolsheviks for their own narrow political and ideological uses. This monopolization prevented the vast majority of traumatized people from working through grief with others outside the personal milieu. I find this line of argument convincing, not least because my research has led me, independently, to come to somewhat similar conclusions (albeit with a different subject and methodology).
An inflexion point occurred during the Revolution and is laid out in Part I. Malysheva points out that the mass public instrumentalization of death first took place in World War I as millions of soldiers died far away from their native place and traditional death rituals were no longer practicable. Urban society developed public death rituals to memorialize the sacrifice of patriotic hero-soldiers, while soldiers developed their own culture of death on the front. The Bolsheviks in the 1920s attempted to marginalize traditional and religious death rituals by replacing them with so-called Red funerals, which had little resonance among ordinary people. The Stalinists in the 1930s then lost interest in Red funeral rites. They ignored ordinary folk to focus on public mourning for party elites and erased death with a culture of joy and happiness.
The book contains much information and interesting insights on these matters and others. It is organized thematically into three sections: thanatology (intellectual and cultural understandings of death), ritual (burials and funerals), and terrain (cemeteries and crematoria). Evidence and arguments are not evenly distributed across the twentieth century but come thickest for earlier periods, and some conclusions are drawn between the early and later periods that lack direct evidentiary elucidation. The introduction has a thorough historiography and theoretical discussion, but readers should know that this book is not a focused study on scientific and medical thanatology. Malysheva's prose is straightforward and free of jargon, and the text is amply illustrated with interesting photographs and well-known works of art, although these are not discussed or used as evidence. Nonetheless, the book is a highly original analysis of a critical topic in Russian history and an impressive example of modern Russian history writing.
