Qualla: Levashovo Memorial Cemetery

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jbuket, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the spring of 1989, a small group of Russians went looking through a fenced patch of forest north of Leningrad. They were members of Memorial, a new human-rights organization founded the year before to document Soviet political repression. Their guide was V. T. Muravsky. The fence belonged to the KGB, and behind it lay 6.5 hectares of pine and birch that the security services had used since 1937 as a secret burial ground. Muravsky's group found the bodies the regime had hidden for fifty years. The FSB, successor to the KGB and NKVD, finally handed the area over to the city in 1990. Archival evidence suggests that 19,540 people are buried at Levashovo, 8,000 of whom were shot during Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. None of them lies in a marked grave.

Image: Jbuket | CC BY-SA 3.0

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: Who They Were

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitold Muratov, CC BY-SA 3.0. The lists at Levashovo are a portrait of who Stalin's purges actually killed. Not generals and politburo members, though some of those are here too. Mostly ordinary Leningraders: factory workers, teachers, engineers, a tram driver arrested for telling a joke, a librarian denounce...

Image: Vitold Muratov | CC BY-SA 3.0

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: The Names Being Restored

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Пётр Иванов, Public domain. Among those known to have been buried at Levashovo: Boris Kornilov, the poet whose lyrics for the song Morning Greets Us with Coolness were sung across the Soviet Union, executed in 1938. Benedikt Livshits, a poet of the Russian Futurist circle, executed in 1938. Nikolay Oleyniko...

Image: Пётр Иванов | Public domain

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: The Memorials Came Later

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Пётр Иванов, Public domain. When Levashovo was opened in 1990, there was nothing there. Just the woods, and the knowledge of what lay beneath them. The first collective memorial, the Moloch of Totalitarianism, sculpted by Nina Galitskaia and Vitaly Gambarov, was placed at the entrance in 1996. After that ca...

Image: Пётр Иванов | Public domain

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: Three Days of Remembrance

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Visem, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three annual gatherings mark the cemetery. On 25 January, or the nearest Sunday, the Saint Petersburg Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of Russia's New Martyrs and Confessors, honoring the Orthodox clergy and laity executed by the Soviet state. In J...

Image: Visem | CC BY-SA 3.0

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: Memorial Was Outlawed

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Пётр Иванов, Public domain. The Memorial Society that found Levashovo and helped open it to the public was forcibly liquidated by Russian courts in late 2021, on technical pretexts that observers around the world recognized as a political decision. For thirty years Memorial had been one of the most importan...

Image: Пётр Иванов | Public domain

Levashovo Memorial Cemetery: What the Wasteland Means

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Пётр Иванов, Public domain. Russians call this place the Levashovskaya Pustosh, the Levashovo Wasteland. Pustosh suggests something abandoned, empty, fallow. It is also, in this context, a refusal: a refusal to call this a normal cemetery, a refusal to pretend the dead were buried with dignity, a refusal to...

Image: Пётр Иванов | Public domain