Paul Goble
Staunton, Apr. 18 – Obituaries are written not by the dead but by the living and thus tell more about those still alive than about those who have died, Svetlana Yeremeyeva, who has read hundreds of reports about the deaths of Russian soldiers in the course of preparing her 2023 book, Dead Time, argues in a new article.
In Novaya Gazeta, she points out that obituaries have only a relatively brief history in Russia. Until the 19th century, low literacy rates and a widespread belief that the individual was less important than the community kept them from appearing in large number. And in Soviet times, the desire to avoid stress individuality kept them formulaic (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/04/18/smert-bez-istorii).
But since the collapse of communism and especially with the rise of the Internet, more and more obituaries are appearing; and their content, Yeremeyeva suggests, provides a useful window into how Russians see themselves and the world of which they are a part by describing the lives of those whose time on earth has ended.
She provides numerous examples of obituaries of Russian soldiers that have appeared in local newspapers and both on local Internet sites and on aggregator sites that gather death notices from particular regions or have been created to promote a particular image of the war and what Russian patriotism should be about.
Yeremeyeva says that with regard to present-day military obituaries in Russia, what is most striking is the uncertainty of those who write them. There is no clear and agreed upon way to talk about those who have died because these soldiers’ deaths raise a bigger question -- “why did this death occur? – that cannot be asked at least not yet in Putin’s Russia.
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