On 29 February 2016, a round table was held in the Council Hall of the State Hermitage on “War Graves as Objects of Historical Remembrance and Cultural Heritage”.
The organizers were the State Hermitage, the Creative Union of Museum Workers of St Petersburg and Leningrad Region and the St Petersburg “We remember everyone by name” Centre for Information and Analysis.
Participants in the round table were representatives of the museum community from St Petersburg, Kronstadt, Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod Regions, heads of organizations that search for wartime burials from Russia and Kazakhstan, staff of the “We remember everyone by name” Centre and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The work of the round table was initiated by Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage. He highlighted a number of problems, drawing colleagues’ attention to the “mania for reburial” that has arisen recently. Galina Savelyeva, President of the “We remember everyone by name” Centre, noted that at present the situation regarding the illegal exhumation of military burials still receives only peripheral attention from the state and the aim of the round table is to draw public attention to this issue.
Other problems raised included the calculation of the number of war graves, measures and funding to set them in order and the coordination of the work of search teams. Repeated mentions were made in the speeches of instances of the “disappearance” of war graves, unprofessional work by searchers on the sites of bloody battles (resulting in the loss of identification tags, badges of rank, unit, etc.) and also the commercialization of search work. The participants expressed concern about the increasing tendency for search teams to pursue formal numerical indicators in their work at the expense of genuine archaeological activities and acts of remembrance.
The participants were also concerned by the practice that has appeared in recent years of opening existing registered war graves and called for strict regulation enshrined in legislation and the provision of the necessary supervision of the search teams’ activities. That supervision, it was said at the meeting, should be carried out by the Ministry of Defence or its local representatives. It is of fundamental importance, the participants in the discussion stated, to establish a unified set of rules for the conduct of search work and any operations relating to war graves on the territory of the Russian Federation, irrespective of the region where they are located. It is also necessary to increase the attention of the professional community and state bodies to the process of systematic registration of war graves, which has sadly “atrophied” in recent years.
