Why Is Russia Reburying So Many Dead People?

Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, wants to exhume the remains of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, which have rested for over seventy years at Kensico cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, and re-inter them in Russia. “The greatest of the Russian geniuses, Sergei Rachmaninoff, has been portrayed in an utterly wrong way in the West recently,” said the minister. “Americans have the gall to privatize Rachmaninoff’s name,” he said, explaining that the composer, who left Russia in 1917, at the age of forty-four, is considered by Americans to be an American.

In the last quarter century, Russia has repeatedly attempted to reclaim the ashes of its émigrés and bring them home, after they have been silent for decades. On a few occasions, it has succeeded—and these successes have been loudly celebrated in Russia as victories in the battleground of history. In this way the reburials are not unlike President Putin’s repeated diving expeditions for ancient amphorae: they are staged ceremonial events intended to show that Russia owns its own history, and all the Russians in it.