CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Khabibulina, Iuliia |
|---|---|
| Title | "This Fiery Cemetery:" Analysis of the Soviet Visual Discourse around the Moscow Crematoirum in the 1920S and the Early 1930s |
| Summary | This thesis project explores Soviet propaganda of cremation and the Moscow crematorium from 1924 to 1934. Primarily targeting a mass Soviet audience, official newspapers, magazines, and popular brochures were illustrated with photographs, drawings, and sketches, which offered visually rich accounts of why new fiery burial should be introduced in the post-revolutionary context. Tracing formal and iconographic models visible in media coverage of cremation, this thesis analyses how Soviet visual print culture represented cremation as a ritual act with its own space, masters of the ceremony, and ritual specialists. Illustrated press documented cremation as an incomplete ritual that did not have a solid beginning and end. At the same time, visual print culture successfully reflected and reinforced the dual nature of the cremation ritual, where scientific materialism and technological dominance were intimately linked with revolutionary inspirations, old religious aesthetics with progressive denying of the past. This portrayal affirmed cremation as a symbolically and emotionally complicated atheist ritual that was not purely iconoclastic or bland and participated in the scientific engineering of death. Therefore, looking at how illustrated press represented cremation, this thesis contributes to the historiography of atheistic experiments and technological utopianism of the Soviet 1920s. |
| Supervisor | Shaw Charles; Rev Istvan |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/khabibulina_iuliia.pdf |
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