AP News, April 25th, 2007
Set on a knoll overlooking an oxbow bend in the Moscow River, the hallowed ground of the Novodevichy Cemetery holds the remains of scores of engineers, artists and politicians who helped shape Russia's tormented past century.
They include the loved and the loathed, the tragic and the triumphant.
Boris Yeltsin, who was buried there Wednesday, was all of these.
He was laid to rest far from Lenin's Tomb in Red Square. Yeltsin's burial at the Kremlin wall, where top Communist officials were interred, would have been unthinkable for the man who helped bring down the Soviet Union.
Novodevichy is Moscow's most prestigious burial ground. No other cemetery in the country exceeds its symbolic importance.
As with much else in Russia, the cemetery has an air of melancholy and mystery.
Its name, like that of the adjacent convent, means "new maidens" _ but accounts vary as to why it is called that. Some say it was because wayward daughters of the royalty were sent to the convent to be cleansed of sin; others suggest it was near a site where Russian girls were sold into Tatar harems.
Also unclear is when it was opened: the dates 1898 and 1904 are variously given.
Anton Chekhov was one of the early famous figures buried there, in 1904. Other notable authors in the cemetery include Mikhail Bulgakov, whose surreal allegory of Stalinism "The Master and Margarita" was suppressed in his lifetime; and Vladimir Mayakovsky, once seen as the vanguard of Soviet poetry but who became disillusioned with the totalitarian state and killed himself in 1930.
Composers Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich and Alexander Scriabin are buried there, as is film director Sergei Eisenstein, leading Soviet architects Vladimir Tatlin and Alexei Shchusev and aircraft designers Andrei Tupolev and Sergei Ilyushin.
In Soviet times, the cemetery also was used to bury figures who were too well-known to ignore but too awkward to fully acknowledge with a grave at the Kremlin.
These figures include Joseph Stalin's first wife Nadezhda Aliluyeva, a suicide at 31; Vyacheslav Molotov, the former foreign minister driven into obscurity by Nikita Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" campaign; and Khrushchev himself.
Khrushchev was quietly buried there in 1971, seven years after he was forced out of power by more-doctrinaire Communists uncomfortable with his maverick ways and efforts to reduce the burden of repression for Soviet citizens.
His grave lies about 200 yards from that of Yeltsin, who in 1991 was a key engineer of the Soviet Union's disintegration.
The most controversial figure in all of Russia's modern history is likely to lie there eventually _ Mikhail Gorbachev, who buried his wife, Raisa, in Novodevichy in 1999.
Yeltsin also was instrumental in allowing the general public to visit the cemetery.
For years, the public had been allowed to visit only on May 9 _ Victory Day _ apparently reflecting authorities' unease at giving broad access to a spot memorializing some of the politically unreliable figures buried there.
Yeltsin, as head of the Moscow city government, restored full public access in 1987, according to the news agency ITAR-Tass.
Now the cemetery is one of Moscow's top tourist attractions and the park around it is a children's favorite for sledding in the winter. In warm weather, youngsters visit a group of metal sculptures based on the Robert McCloskey children's book "Make Way for Ducklings," donated by former first lady Barbara Bush.
