Donskoe cemetery

The New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow was laid out in 1910 as an extension to the old Donskoy Monastery cemetery and grew during the Soviet era into one of the capital's major burial grounds. The ten-hectare site held the USSR's first crematorium from 1927 - installed in a converted cemetery church, a deliberately programmatic gesture in the atheist Soviet state. The cemetery holds prominent scientists, actors and writers, but also thousands of victims of Stalinist terror in anonymous mass graves - burial mounds 1 and 3 contain the ashes of thousands executed between 1937 and 1953. The cemetery is open daily for free and is often confused with the adjacent old monastery cemetery, which holds the literary nobility of imperial Russia.