Due to the high cost of burning bodies, Moscow residents arrange “false cremation” for dead relatives: they say goodbye to the dead in the capital, then the bodies go down in an elevator, but in fact they are taken to another city for cremation. Oleg Shelyagov, head of the ritual service Ritual.ru, told RBC about this.
According to him, with the declared cost of cremation in Moscow at 20 thousand rubles, it costs more, at 130-150 thousand rubles, "it is hard for the population to digest local checks."
Shelyagov explained that during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the demand for cremation increased from 53-54% of the total number of burials to 70-72%, as there were problems with burials. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, the share of the service has always been around 60%, Shelyagov noted. The head of the funeral service added that the trend is now that a large amount of cremation has begun to leave Moscow for regions where this service is cheaper. For example, in Nizhny Novgorod and Tula.
“There was practically such a business name – false cremation. (…) You come to the farewell hall, say goodbye to a relative, and then the coffin with the body is conditionally immersed down in an elevator or goes into the wall, the body is taken away for cremation in another city, and after a while you are simply given an urn with ashes and related documents.
According to Shelyagov, the lack of cemeteries is a constant problem in big cities. To solve it, additional territories are being allocated, new cemeteries and crematoria are being prepared to open. At the same time, almost all crematoria are private, some are opened jointly with the municipality, but the investments are still private.
Earlier, The Insider drew attention to the Russian funeral services business, which is experiencing an unprecedented rise thanks to state support. At first, government policies to combat the coronavirus helped, and since 2022 the number of graves has been growing amid the war in Ukraine. Thus, the cemetery of PMC Wagner in the Krasnodar Territory has grown seven times in two months. Now cemeteries allocate soldiers' plots, sell special camouflage coffins and introduce new rites of military burial. At the same time, crematoria previously suffered from sanctions, but are now opening at an unprecedented rate, as "import substitution has been established."