Donskoye Cemetery
The New Donskoy Cemetery is in southwest central Moscow, just south of the Donskoy Monastery. It opened in 1910 because there was no room left inside the old monastery, and it has been closed to new burials since the 1980s.
Among the first people buried there was Sergey Muromtsev, who was the speaker of the first Russian parliament. Maria Gartung, Pushkin’s daughter who modeled for Anna Karenina, was buried in 1919.
After the Russian Revolution, many Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Moscow and people executed by the NKVD were secretly buried at Donskoy. The cemetery is believed to contain mass graves with the remains of figures like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Pyotr Krasnov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Isaac Babel, and other victims of Stalin’s regime.
Later, some famous remains were moved to the nearby Novodevichy Cemetery, including painter Valentin Serov, composer Sergei Taneyev, and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
In 1927, the church of St. Seraphim was turned into Moscow’s first crematorium. The church’s vaults were adapted for cremation, and the new crematorium opened in October 1927. Most people buried at Donskoy were cremated and their ashes placed in urns. For decades, the Donskoy crematorium was the only one in Moscow.
In 1930, the authorities dug a large pit in the eastern part of the cemetery to hold cremated ashes from the Great Purge. It was chosen because it was isolated from normal burial areas and no longer considered sacred ground. The ashes of many executed prisoners were dumped there until 1942.
Today the pit has two markers. One, from the Soviet era, reads “Common Grave Number One: Unclaimed Ashes from 1930–42.” The other marker, placed after 1989, says, “Here lie the remains of the innocent victims of political repressions in 1930–42 who were shot. To their eternal memory.”
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:50 (CET).