In the summer of 2019, a resident of Yekaterinburg, retired colonel Alexander Kruglov, contacted the RG editorial team. At that time, he had already been fighting alone for four years to put in order the abandoned cemetery where the soldiers who died in the Sverdlovsk evacuation hospitals were buried. He was outraged that the territory of the cemetery was not fenced, the graves were buried, and the names of those buried had not yet been established and immortalized. Over the years, the activist has received hundreds of responses from various authorities. The officials assured: there are no graves of soldiers in Uktus. According to the documents, the place has the status of a “specially protected natural area”, where you can walk dogs and have barbecues, but there is no reason, neither moral nor economic, to guard the soldiers’ graves.
The parliamentary candidates promised and promised, but nothing changed. And then ordinary people got to work.
Of course, we could not help but support Kruglov, this story became ours. As time went by, local residents feared that the site could be given up for development, especially since the skyscrapers were approaching the forest itself. On the eve of the elections, parliamentary candidates organized public relations campaigns and promised and promised… but nothing changed. And then ordinary people, mostly young people, got to work. After several posts in RG, medical school students began taking care of the cemetery. Representatives of the Ural Volunteer Corps association, the All-Russian Student Rescue Corps and the Cossack youth community came to their aid. The young people cleaned the space of debris, refreshed the paint on the stars’ tombstones and hung signs with well-known names. Then the volunteers even received some money thanks to a grant and did what the city authorities had not been able to do for many years: they surrounded the cemetery with a strict fence made of metal posts and chains and installed an information sign.
The head of the Chkalovsky district, Evgeny Shipitsyn, a career officer, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, awarded the Order of the Red Star, helped as best he could. He studied and served at the Sverdlovsk Higher Military-Political Tank Artillery School (later EVAKU) and remembers well how every spring the cadets organized a cleaning day at the Uktussky cemetery, located next to the school. Several years ago, Ilya Korovin, a resident of Yekaterinburg and director of the Romanov Memorial charitable foundation, learned about the situation around the cemetery. He decided that he could not remain on the sidelines either, that order at a military funeral was a sign of respect for the feat of his parents and grandparents.
Korovin was supported by many residents of Yekaterinburg, entire organizations, and now a real monument appeared at the cemetery – a monument to all the soldiers buried here: a block of granite on a pedestal, on it there is a plaque with the names of 163 people. Now they really are not forgotten. But that’s not the end of the story.
– First of all and most importantly, it is necessary to legalize the territory so that it receives a cadastral number and cemetery status. And for this it will be necessary to allocate about 500 square meters of the forest fund, since, according to the documents, the cemeteries are not located on the territory of forest parks, says Ilya Korovin, who maintains exhausting correspondence with officials. – Next: certification, giving it the appropriate form.
All of the above must certainly be done, because it is clear: this story is not about someone’s past, but about our present. And about you and me.
