Local Mass-media and the Problems of Municipal Cemeteries

Abstract

Ol’ga Molyarenko — Candidate of Science in Sociology, Lecturer, School of Public Administration, Faculty of Social Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Address: 20 Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: omolyarenko@hse.ru

Citation: Molyarenko O. (2017) Local Mass-media and the Problems of Municipal Cemeteries. Mir Rossii, vol. 26, no 3, pp. 142–164 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038Х-2017-26-3-142-164

The maintenance of public cemeteries and the organization of funeral services were not efficiently tackled by the federal authorities in post-Soviet Russia. In the early 1990s, almost all cemeteries and the services related to them were passed on to municipal authorities, and the legislative framework was passed on to regional authorities. The federal law which set the more general legislative framework in 1996 did not solve the issue of legalizing existing cemeteries. As a result, the incompleteness and inconsistency of the formal aspect surrounding cemetery businesses left a lot of room for corruption, especially in urban areas, and led to a significant deterioration in services in rural areas. This article highlights the main remaining problems in this regard. It is based on an analysis of local media content (published in 2015). The analyses identify the following difficulties and disfunctions: (1) the absence of the legal registration of cemeteries and allocated land plots; (2) the lack of sufficient land for expanding cemeteries; (3) the lack of finances to maintain cemetery services; (4) the uncertain legal status of specialized services; (5) corruption and contractor opportunism; (6) the generally poor level of services and condition of the infrastructure surrounding cemetery businesses. The article concludes by discussing measures which can be taken in order to eliminate some of existing problems.