Maybe it's because Halloween is coming and everybody in my neighborhood has fake tombstones on the lawn. Or maybe, again because it's almost Halloween, I've been thinking of going to Brooklyn for the annual Green-Wood tour. Whatever the reason, I've been thinking cemeteries, and so has the Moscow News.

The English language news weekly has a feature this week on Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, and how to tour it. Before you say, ewwwww, visiting dead people, stop and think: A cemetery is probably the closest most of us will ever get to some of the world's most famous people. Thousands of people go to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris every year to see the final resting place of celebrities like Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Green-Wood has all the 19th and 20th century highlights from Louis Comfort Tiffany to Leonard Bernstein, with plenty of lowlights too: people like mobster Albert Anastasia and temptress Lola Montez.

In the case of Novodevichy, you go to see the graves of people like Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei Prokofiev and two of its most recent arrivals, Boris Yeltsin and Mstislav Rostropovich. The Moscow News article says that, in Soviet times, Novodevichy ranked second behind Red Square as the burial site of the nation's elite. But since the end of Communism, Novodevichy has become the be all and end all.

Novodevichy Cemetery is located on the grounds of Novodevichy Convent. I got to see it in the early 1980s, after the Soviets had repurposed it, as they were wont to do with things religious, into a museum of something glorifying the proletariat. Novodevichy is a kremlin, a walled fortress, and over the years it served as a shelter for both high-ranking women and foundlings. It is now recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The convent alone is worth a visit, and it is easy to get to by subway: Take the Red line to Sportivnaya, which is two stops past the stop for Gorky Park (Park Kultury). But take some extra time to stroll the grounds of the cemetery, and you will discover many famous names of Russia's past.

Image Credit: Novodevichy, by sahua