Novodevichy Cemetery

Grand Prince Vasily III began building the Novodevichy Bogoroditse-Smolensky convent on the Devichye Pole in 1524, in memory of the taking of Smolensk by Russian troops in 1514, and the Smolensk Cathedral was finished for the patronal feast on 28 June 1525, fourteen months after it was begun. From the foundation the convent took in girls and women of noble families for the tonsure, sometimes against their will and for political reasons. Burials on convent ground begin in the sixteenth century, novices and nuns at first and in time members of princely, boyar and tsarist families. Princess Irina Zakharyina-Yurieva was buried beneath the Smolensk Cathedral in 1533, in one of the early graves to survive; the crypt below holds Peter I's sister the tsarevna Sofia, tonsured as the nun Susanna, and Peter's first wife Yevdokia Lopukhina, who took the name Elena in religion.

The first burial here to be venerated across the country was that of Denis Davydov, poet and partisan of the Patriotic War of 1812. By the middle of the nineteenth century merchants and the intelligentsia were being buried alongside, and the ground had become the most significant necropolis of persons of learned rank in Moscow. Ground here was expensive: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a first-class plot cost up to a thousand roubles, a second-class plot up to five hundred and a third-class plot up to three hundred. Church tradition did not permit funeral services in monasteries, and the parish church that had served that purpose was blown up in 1812 on Napoleon's orders and never rebuilt; from the first years of the twentieth century the services were held in the convent itself, the precedent thought to have been the funeral of Anton Chekhov in 1904.

The ground was extended in 1898 with two hectares of former vegetable gardens south of the convent, laid out to a design by the architects Sergei Rodionov and Ivan Mashkov, who is himself buried in this part. The cemetery opened in 1904 and its official age is reckoned from that year, though the inauguration is sometimes dated to 1898. The first grave on this ground is that of Sergei Gavrilovich Vavilov, a Moscow townsman who died on 26 February 1904.

Soon after the October Revolution the All-Russian Central Executive Committee designated the ground beyond the southern edge of the cemetery, where ordinary Muscovites had been buried, as a zone for the burial of persons of social standing. The convent itself was closed in 1922 and its buildings given to a museum of the era of Tsarevna Sofia and the Streltsy revolts, later renamed the Museum of the Emancipation of Women; some researchers date its founding to 1922 and others to 1930 or 1931, and it lasted four years.

With the museum open, the convent necropolis was closed and liquidated, because visitors and staff found its proximity uncomfortable. It held about three thousand graves, and only sixteen burials were moved across to the modern cemetery. Relatives had to carry out the reburials themselves and many were afraid to: monastery cemeteries were regarded as White ground, and declaring kinship with those lying in them, who counted as enemies of the people, was dangerous. The remaining monuments were gathered in one place and carried off by whoever wanted them for their own relatives' graves, the old inscriptions changed for new ones.

This stopped in 1934, when the plundering was halted and the necropolis was to be restored from photographs, cemetery plans and the recollections of visitors. Historians located graves and returned the surviving headstones or set up new ones, which is why some old graves carry inscriptions in the new orthography. Of nearly three thousand graves, about ninety were recovered.

From the 1930s Novodevichy was regarded as the cemetery of the national elite, and burial there a recognition of high service to the public. That importance dates from the 1930s, when the necropolises of the medieval Muscovite monasteries at Simonov, Danilov and Donskoy were scheduled for demolition. Only the Donskoy came through the Stalin years relatively intact. Remains were transferred here as other cemeteries of the capital were liquidated, and in some cases because officials wished to gather the famous dead in one place. From the Simonov monastery came the ashes of the poet Dmitry Venevitinov and the writer Sergei Aksakov, from the destroyed Dorogomilovo Jewish cemetery those of the painter Isaac Levitan, and from the cemetery of the Danilov monastery those of Sergei and Pavel Tretyakov. After the necropolis at the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God at Vladykino was liquidated, the remains of the actress Maria Yermolova were brought here.

Nikolai Gogol's remains were moved together with his monument, a cross and a graveside Golgotha. In 1952 that monument was replaced by a bust by the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, inscribed to Gogol from the government of the Soviet Union, and for the two hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth the bust was removed and the Golgotha restored to the grave. Urns holding the ashes of those killed when the aeroplane Maxim Gorky crashed on 18 May 1935 stand beneath a monumental panel to the aircraft on the convent wall. Fyodor Chaliapin died in Paris in 1938, and the opera singer's remains were reburied at Novodevichy forty-six years after his death.

The cemetery was extended south of the convent in 1949, doubling its area, and between 1950 and 1956 the new ground was walled, gates were made and service buildings put up. A columbarium runs inside those walls, holding some seven thousand urns as of 2018. In the Soviet period burial at Novodevichy was second in prestige only to burial in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, and among Soviet leaders both Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev would be buried here.

In 1965 the People's Artist Boris Andreyev gave up his own place in the cemetery so that the actor Pyotr Aleinikov could be buried in it, and was buried at Vagankovo instead. In the 1970s admission was made payable, after repeated vandalism at Khrushchev's grave. In the second half of that decade a branch cemetery appeared at Kuntsevo, and at the end of the 1970s the ground was extended once more, west of the convent, over a small filled-in lake and a stonemason's yard.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the Kremlin Wall was no longer used for burials, and Novodevichy came to be reserved for the most symbolically significant. The former premier Nikolai Tikhonov was buried here in 1997 at state expense, having no money of his own. In April 2007 the first President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich were buried here within a single week; the following month the manager of presidential affairs, Vladimir Kozhin, said that almost no free places remained and that it was time to consider where prominent statesmen should be buried, with Novodevichy's branch at Troyekurovskoye the expected answer. A monument to Yeltsin by the sculptor Georgy Frangulyan, in the form of a lowered Russian flag, was unveiled on the Central Avenue on 23 April 2008.

The convent was declared an especially valuable object of the cultural heritage of the peoples of Russia in 1991, and in 1995 the convent and the cemetery were entered on the list of architectural monuments of federal significance; since 2004 they have stood on the UNESCO cultural and natural heritage list. The hurricane of 1998 tore the crosses from the cemetery's Smolensk Cathedral, and they were soon put back. On 22 March 2010 the Moscow Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church received the convent for perpetual free use under an agreement signed with the federal property agency, and on 26 June 2017 President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on marking the five hundredth anniversary of the convent's foundation in 2024.

In 2013 a new section of the Kuntsevo cemetery took on the bulk of burials and the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery opened at Mytishchi, north of Moscow, for the country's leading figures, military and state officials, veterans and honoured citizens, though Novodevichy still receives distinguished burials. What the name now means is the new cemetery where the Soviet elite were buried; the convent's own necropolis is all but forgotten, the dozens of headstones left from it standing about the grounds without system and some of them over other people's graves. Some twenty-six thousand people lie in the cemetery, which covers more than 7.5 hectares in the Khamovniki district, is run by the Moscow city institution Ritual, and is open from nine until five with free admission.