Tully Moore

Head Under Ground

5 - 22 May 2010 @ 114 Bendigo Street, Prahran

Head Under Ground (Yekaterinburg’s Plots)

Yekaterinburg is a major city in the central Russia. Founded in 1723 , it was named after Tsar Peter the Greats wife, Empress Yekaterina’s namesake, Saint Catherine.

After the Russian Revolution and on July 17 1918, Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, 5 of their children, a doctor and two servants were executed by the Bolshevik Secret Police at Ipatiev House, a merchants home where they were imprisoned for several months, in Yekaterinburg. Apparently the execution squad comprised of four Russian Bolsheviks and seven soldiers who were Hungarian prisoners-of-war. The Hungarians spoke little, if any Russian and were chosen because the commanding officer, the Cheka, didn’t think a Russian soldier could kill the Tsar or his daughters. It is alleged, one of the Hungarian soldiers was Imre Nagy. When ordered to shoot the Romanov’s, Nagy laid down his weapon and said he refused to kill innocent people and children.

Nagy later became a national hero and Prime Minister of Hungry (for a second time) following his role in the anti-soviet revolution of 1956.

Between 1924 and 1991, Yekaterinburg was known as Sverdlovsk, named after the Bolshevik party leader Yakov Sverdlov. Sverdlovsk was Boris Yeltsin’s home town. Before becoming the first President of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin, ordered the destruction of Ipatiev House. It was 1977 and Yeltsin was following orders from Moscow. The destruction was carried out in order to prevent the Ipatiev House from becoming a shrine to the Ramanov’s.

In 1998, 80 years to the day after their execution in the cellar of the house, Yeltsin represented the ‘people’ at the funeral of the Tsar and his family, when they were reburied in St Petersburg.

During the 1991 coup attempt, Yeltsin selected Sverdlovsk as the ‘back-up’ capital of the Russian Federation. After the failure of the coup and the the dissolution of the USSR, the city returned to it’s historical name, Yekaterinburg.

In October of 1991, Yeltsin declared ‘shock therapy’ on the country in the form of sweeping market-orientated reform. The privatisation that resulted meant control shifted from the state to a selection of groups and individuals, many of these are reported to have had with links to both the Government and the mafia. In the following years there was a substantial rise in criminal gangs and crime. It is about this time that Yekaterinburg became one of Russia’s most violent gangster zones. Home not only to Yeltsin, but many of the Russian mafia bosses, The early and mid 90‘s ’s in Yekaterinburg were notorious for their gang wars. In one 10 month period 1,142 people died in gang related crime. Many of these were the gang leaders, Russian mafia bosses, who died in wars primarily fought over the control of the precious stone and metal industries of Yekaterinburg.

Located in the industrial Uralmarsh area of Yekaterinburg, once the centre of the USSR’s military manufacturing, you can find the local cemetery. It is home to many of the Russian Mafia’s fallen comrades. The markers of their graves are monolithic black-marble tombstones. Often life-size in scale, many of them have photographic images of the deceased meticulously etched into them.

Perhaps effigy’s of the deceased, these imposing black and white death portraits depict men posing at tables ladden with signifiers of their wealth. Some stand in front of their lavish mansion homes or others beside their expensive yet generic cars. The headstones, mostly of men, reproduce their Mafioso garb - designer suits, leather jackets and tassled leather shoes. Thick (I assume gold) chains and bracelts, their hands hold cigarettes, vodka or perhaps the keys to their prized mercedes. If not in Yekaterinburg, you may be mistaken for having come across a shrine to Al Capone? Or perhaps a monument to his hollywood versions Robert De Niro or William Forsythe? Distinguished memorials, tributes or mere characterizations. Lonely portraits in a necropolis.

If momento mori works are to remind us of our own mortality and the punishments we face if we ‘break the rules of our religion’, these Russian Mafia headstones are more like cinema posters laying claim to the narrative of a gang, it’s members and the power they command. Embellishments of underworld chronicles, another grand historical narrative proposed and sitting beside those plots of the apparent ordinary, the less influential. Markers of the death of one cold war and the continuity of another. Hierarchies of memorial in cemeteries of ambiguity.

Lisa Radford