A coffin, a cemetery, hundreds of billions of rubles. How officials, security forces and bandits divide the funeral market – and what does Tesak have to do with it. Ivan Golunov investigation

About two million people die in Russia every year. The turnover of the funeral industry only officially amounts to about 60 billion rubles a year; the size of its shadow sector, according to the authorities, can reach 250 billion. Over the past thirty years, the ritual market in Russia has been divided several times – representatives of organized crime, the security forces, and the state participated in this. As a result, excesses constantly arise in different regions: from a shootout at the Khovansky cemetery in Moscow to throwing corpses over a fence in Yekaterinburg, unauthorized mass graves in Togliatti and the suicide of a cemetery owner in Omsk. Meduza Special Correspondent Ivan Golunov figured out how the ritual market works in Russia, and found out how control over it was gradually transferred from people close to criminal structures to people associated with the state.

On December 9, 2017, Leonid Bronevoi, an actor whose most famous role was Muller in Seventeen Moments of Spring, died at home. As a rule, famous people in Moscow are buried in one of the prestigious cemeteries – Novodevichy or Troekurovsky. Formally, there are no places on them for a long time, but an exception is made for people of the caliber of Bronevoy. According to Meduza’s interlocutors in the Moscow government, the decision is made personally by Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who, for this, sends SMS to his subordinate Alexei Nemeryuk, head of the department of trade and services, which also includes the ritual industry. In the case of Bronev, Sobyanin not only ordered a place at the Novodevichy Cemetery, but also asked the city enterprise “Ritual” to cover all the costs of organizing the funeral.

To do this, however, was not so easy. A Ritual employee tells Meduza that the company’s agent arrived at Bronevoy’s place just 40 minutes after the doctor pronounced him dead. It turned out that by this time the actor’s relatives had already entered into an agreement with another ritual company – “Darko”: her agent arrived at the same time as the ambulance. The representative of Darko did not know who the deceased was, but refused to hand over the organization of the funeral to municipal competitors — and since Bronevoy’s relatives had already given the agent’s passport, it was “practically impossible” to terminate the contract with him, according to Meduza’s interlocutor.

As a result, already at Novodevichy, the head of the cemetery had to intervene in the funeral process – according to an employee of Ritual, they tried to install the coffin on a pedestal to say goodbye to relatives and fans upside down. “If there had been an embarrassment, then no one would have bothered to figure out who organized the funeral,” continues the source of Meduza. “It would be our fault.”

In Soviet times, the state was responsible for all funerals, but after the collapse of the USSR, the ritual monopoly, like most others, was eliminated. In 1996, a law was passed that left only the management of cemeteries and crematoria to the state. The control over the ritual services themselves was entrusted to the municipalities. At first, they issued funeral licenses to private owners, but in 2002, as part of the fight against bureaucracy, they were also canceled.

By that time, the funeral services market was one of the most criminal in the country. In different cities it was regularly shared with shooting and explosions. Municipal officials and the police were more like servants for the funeral business – and all the costs associated with competition were shifted to the consumer: as a rule, the relatives of the deceased do not delve into the details of the services imposed on them and are ready to pay as much as they say.

Since then, in many regions, the same thing has happened to the funeral industry as to the entire Russian economy. Officials cleared the market and squeezed its former owners to the periphery, using law enforcement agencies for this: instead of shootings and explosions, prosecutorial checks are now in progress. Somewhere monopolies have formed under the leadership of former and current officials, deputies and security officials. Somewhere businessmen-burialers themselves entered power; somewhere they managed to become junior partners of people in power. There are also regions where the “cleansing” of the market has not yet been completed: dozens of funeral business groups operate in Moscow, often associated with former officials, and the authorities, together with the security forces, are fighting them.

PETERSBURG

Private security monopoly

In the late 1990s, a wave of murders of people connected with the funeral business swept across St. Petersburg. The victims were seven orderlies of the city mortuaries, two lawyers representing the interests of funeral companies, the head of the Department of Pathology of the Medical Academy named after. Mechnikov, as well as a priest who performed the rites in the chapel at one of the mortuaries.

The investigation found that all the murders were organized by a gang that gathered around one morgue and soon subjugated the rest. The nurses under her control forced the relatives to prepare the body for burial, inflating prices – and disrupted the funeral if they refused to pay. The head of the gang was Valery Burykin, an inspector for work with personnel in the city pathoanatomical bureau. In February 2003, a “gang of orderlies” killed another lawyer. A year later, the main leaders of the group were arrested.

The new “owner” of the St. Petersburg ritual market is Igor Minakov, a former detective operative in Sestroretsk, who founded the successful private security company Zashchita in St. Petersburg: since 1998, its employees have guarded city cemeteries.

Minakov’s main partner is the former head of the city funeral company “Ritual Services” Valery Larkin. The companies affiliated with the two businessmen, according to the newspaper Delovoy Peterburg, now control about 90% of the city’s funeral market. Their group also works with state-owned companies: for example, the Ritual Services car depot and Avtobaza.ru, controlled by Minakov and Larkin. Funeral services are located at the same address and work closely together, as the FAS department for St. Petersburg has established, Avtobaza employees often come to collect the bodies of the dead instead of employees of the state-owned company.

Nine out of ten private St. Petersburg companies that maintain 71 city cemeteries are also controlled by Minakov’s structures or are associated with them. Among the companies associated with Minakov and Larkin, there are manufacturers of coffins and monuments. In morgues or forensic medical examination bureaus where corpses are taken, Minakov’s companies rent premises where the bodies of the dead are processed for money. Employees of state medical institutions are prohibited from doing this by order of the Ministry of Health – and Minakov’s companies work virtually without competitors, while gaining access to databases of deaths. In exchange, they allow forensic scientists to use refrigerators and other equipment installed in rented premises (although, for example, in one of the crematoriums, Minakov’s company leases only 750 of the total 10 square meters of territory). Moreover, embalming services are provided by forensic experts in their spare time from their main work.

The procedure for obtaining death certificates is similar. For “convenience” they can be obtained only in two offices of the registry office of St. Petersburg, at the entrance to which there are offices of the St. Petersburg ritual company, owned by Valery Larkin. According to Meduza’s calculations, the revenue of Minakov and Larkin’s informal holding in 2016 amounted to more than 2,3 billion rubles, and its net profit was almost 580 million.

VOLGOGRAD

Society “Memory”

In the winter of 1996, Boris Yeltsin signed a law regulating the ritual industry. The document guaranteed to all citizens the right to free funerals at public expense and transferred the management of the ritual sphere to municipalities – cities and regions. Now the federal budget pays only part of the cost of funerals; the rest must be compensated by municipal enterprises.

Now the amount guaranteed by the federal authorities is 5701 rubles. In Moscow, the cost of services under the guaranteed list is set at 16 rubles, and in the Yamalo-Nenets District – at 701 rubles. The difference is compensated from the regional budget. You can entrust the organization of the funeral to a company authorized by the authorities – or do everything yourself, having received compensation in cash.

After the introduction of new rules, each municipality approved a guaranteed list of services and goods that any citizen can count on. As a federal audit in 2017 showed, the requirements for the quality of these services vary – sometimes even within the same region.

For example, in Biysk in the Altai Territory, an unupholstered coffin made of raw boards is provided free of charge, and in neighboring Belokurikha – a coffin upholstered in velvet. In Stary Oskol, representatives of the ritual service must put the deceased in a coffin, and in a number of other districts of the Belgorod Region, relatives. The state annually spends about 20 billion rubles on these guarantees – however, in reality, it is almost impossible to use free funerals in many regions.

In June 2016, Tatyana Popova, a resident of Volgograd, had an uncle who died after a long illness. The police officers who arrived to record the death announced the need for an autopsy; they were followed by an agent of the city funeral service “Memory” – and demanded an immediate payment of 20 thousand rubles for transporting the body to the morgue.

There are about 20 funeral homes in Volgograd, but in fact, you can bury a person only with the help of “Memory” – other companies do not have access to the infrastructure. The company was founded by Irina Solovieva, whose husband, Iosif Efremov, oversaw municipal ritual companies for many years.

In 2002, “Memory” got a contract from the mayor’s office for 15 years for the provision of burial services according to a guaranteed list and the maintenance of cemeteries; shortly thereafter, the city funeral company “Kerber”, which was headed by Efremov, was declared bankrupt. Thus, “Memory” became the only company with the right to dig up graves, and its agents settled in the city’s morgues.

When, a few years later, the Volgograd mayor’s office created a city control room, where policemen and doctors were supposed to report all information about deaths, it was located in the Memory office, and the dispatchers themselves were employees of the company.

Even the Russian Orthodox Church could not stand the competition with “Memory”. In 2004, the Volgograd diocese opened its own ritual company and received a plot for the creation of a religious cemetery. Prices there were low, things were going well – however, soon the prosecutor’s office revealed violations in the allocation of land and forbade the church to hold funerals; the site was eventually transferred to the management of “Memory”.

Solovieva’s company developed business in different directions. In 2011, “Memory” solemnly opened the first crematorium in the region and began to actively advertise it. The new enterprise excited residents of neighboring residential buildings – from them to the crematorium was less than 100 meters, which is contrary to sanitary standards.

When residents turned to the mayor’s office and the sanitary and epidemiological station, they answered that no permits for the construction and commissioning of the crematorium were issued, which means that it is not there. According to Rosreestr, there is a production base on the territory. The crematorium continues to operate.

When in the summer of 2016 an agent of “Memory” asked Tatyana Popova for 20 thousand rubles, she called the company’s office and the district administration – and her uncle’s body was taken to the morgue for free. The woman read on the Internet about a free funeral according to a guaranteed list and hoped that Memory would fulfill these obligations. However, when she came to the company’s office, she was told that they were not going to bury a relative for free: “Either pay 80 thousand rubles, or leave the private territory.”

The morgue refused to issue a death certificate to Popova for several days, referring to the fact that they had not yet had time to conduct an autopsy.

Upon discovering that Dmitry Krylov, a deputy of the Volgograd Duma, criticized “Memory” in the press, Popova turned to him for help. As Krylov told Meduza, they managed to obtain a death certificate and found a company that agreed to organize a farewell for a smaller amount.

However, when the hearse arrived at the cemetery, the guards forbade bringing the coffin into the territory, saying that it did not meet the quality requirements for ritual goods. This list was approved by the Volgograd Duma in 2009, on the initiative of Irina Solovieva, who had been elected a United Russia deputy the year before and became the head of the committee on municipal services.

When employees of the competitor of “Pamyat” began to dig the grave, the diggers of “Pamyat” immediately threw the earth back. As a result, the deputy of the Volgograd City Duma Dmitry Krylov dug the hole himself, and the uncle was buried only under the supervision of the police.

According to Yulia Ermakova, Deputy Head of the Social Sphere and Trade Control Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, Volgograd is one of the leaders in terms of the number of complaints and violations in the funeral industry. Back in 2011, the department demanded that Memory and the Volgograd City Hall eliminate the violations – however, the company chose to pay a fine for failure to comply with the order.

According to the director of the Volgograd funeral home “Radonitsa” Yevgeny Yalymov, now funerals in Volgograd cost three times more on average than in the city of Volzhsky, located on the other side of the Volga: 60-80 thousand rubles against 23 thousand. Radonitsa used to rent part of the municipal premises for its office, but Solovieva initiated the termination of the lease.

Irina Solovieva continues her political career: today she is the vice-speaker of the Volgograd Regional Duma. In this capacity, she regularly enters the ratings of the richest civil servants in the region. In 2017, Solovieva earned more than 18 million rubles; she owns four residential buildings, 26 non-residential buildings, her own pond, as well as several Mercedes and Porsche Cayenne cars.

“Memory” is now owned by the son of Solovieva – 21-year-old Iosif Iosifovich Efremov, who returned to Volgograd after graduating from the University in London. In 2015, Efremov Jr. became a deputy of the City Duma and curator of the United Russia party project Strong Family.

In 2016, the revenue of eight ritual companies united under the Memory brand amounted to 561,1 million rubles; net profit – 83 million rubles. In the same year, Efremov Jr.’s company received a subsidy of 26 million rubles from the city budget.

In 2017, the administration of Volgograd, without a competition, extended the contract with Memory for another 10 years. And at the end of the year, she made a decision on “tax holidays” for enterprises in the ritual industry. Volgograd deputies decided not to demand money from the funeral business “because of the lack of competition and the weak development of the industry.”

MOSCOW

ritual and crime

Since 2002, anyone can formally become a funeral agent without additional permissions. In reality, getting your share in the ritual market is not so easy. You need access to the main resource – information about death. Until recently, the leaders of the funeral market in Moscow were those who were able to organize the flow of information from morgues at city hospitals.

Vladimir Panin, the deputy chief physician of the Moscow ambulance service, first came up with the idea to place orders there. Panin’s company and its competitors officially rented small areas at morgues – and served people who came to this morgue for the body of a relative.

With the gradual privatization of the industry, more and more players associated with organized crime appeared in it. Panin, the creator of Stix-S, recalled that in a showdown with mafia structures, his office was set on fire several times and three employees died. Even the companies created at that time by the official authorities turned out to be connected with crime.

In 1993, the Moscow authorities established the Ritual-Service agency, which was supposed to organize commercial funerals (in advertising, the company stated that it buried “mainly young people who died violently in their prime”). Arigon-company has become a partner of the mayor’s office.

Officials called it English, however, according to the Moscow Registration Chamber, the founder of the company was Olga Schneider, the wife of businessman Semyon Mogilevich. Mogilevich himself, who later appeared on the list of people wanted by the FBI (the Americans believed that he “controls a huge criminal network”), owned 40% of the British company Arigon.

In the late 90s, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov began to streamline the ritual market – out of 900 city ritual companies, 19 received the status of accredited by the mayor’s office. The owners transferred a small block of shares to the city, and in return they received the status of a “city specialized service” (SCS) and preferences: they had the right to arrange social funerals at the expense of the budget, offer services on behalf of the city, and so on. The author of the idea was the head of the Assistance Charitable Foundation Alexei Suloev.

In those years, he actively collaborated with representatives of the mayor’s office: at one time he was an assistant to the head of the Moscow City Duma, Vladimir Platonov, and in the early 2000s, he owned a company that opened several dozen Russian Bistro cafes (Mayor Luzhkov personally oversaw this network; he owns patents for kulebyaka and sbiten, which were sold in the Russian Bistro).

The 19 companies that received SAC status were selected by the non-profit organization Administration of Funeral Organizations and Services (UROS), which was headed by Suloev. Four of them were closely connected with Suloev himself, he tried to take over the others. Thus, the head of the “Ritual Orthodox Service” Anna Shirokova complained to Luzhkov that Suloev, in order to include the company in the list of the GSS, demanded that a blocking stake be transferred to him, citing “close acquaintance with the leaders of organized criminal groups” as an argument.

Shortly thereafter, Shirokova’s company was stripped of its accreditation; several GSSs indeed transmitted all the same UROS. Meduza was unable to contact Suloev. The founders of UROS were the Gorbrus and Ritus-Service companies – they were created by several people from Lyubertsy near Moscow, who in the 1990s owned a distillery, a market, a shopping center, a crematorium and a cemetery in Balashikha (Suloev was also a co-owner of several of their shopping centers in Balashikha).

In 2012, one of these Lyubertsy businessmen, Yuri Manilov, was charged with racketeering and extortion along with crime boss Mark Milgotin (two years later, the case was closed due to lack of corpus delicti). In 2007, Aleksey Suloev headed the capital’s funeral state-owned enterprise “Ritual”, and after some time he became deputy head of the department of trade and services – and in this capacity he oversaw the funeral industry.

By the end of the decade, an informal holding of funeral companies associated with Suloev controlled more than 40% of the ritual market in Moscow, including placing orders in the mortuaries of the capital’s largest hospitals. The closest competitor was Panin’s Styx-S, an industry veteran whose agents also worked in hospitals; its share was 25,1%.

When Luzhkov was replaced as mayor by Sergei Sobyanin, the situation changed. In 2011, Suloev resigned from the city hall, and in 2013 the city got rid of shares in most accredited companies, depriving them of some of their privileges. Now only two GSS remain – the municipal “Ritual” and “Ritual-Service”, once created by the wife of Semyon Mogilevich (shortly after the businessman’s arrest in 2008, she sold the company’s shares to the company’s management).

At the same time, the Moscow City Property Department terminated morgue lease agreements with private companies due to “inexpediency.” Their places were taken by agents of the Ritual. As a result, the share of “Stix-S” by 2018 decreased tenfold, and the revenue of “Gorbrus” almost halved in four years (142 million rubles against 275 million).

The holding associated with Suloev managed to keep only the part of its business near Moscow. The decision to expel private companies from morgues was lobbied by Andrei Marsiy, who replaced Suloev in the Department of Trade and Services. The former top manager of the pension fund “Russian Railways” “Welfare”, Marsy began preparations for the privatization of the ritual state-owned enterprise.

One of the two candidates for its purchase was the Welfare Foundation, but at the end of 2013, after a series of arrests of Ritual employees, Marsy resigned from the mayor’s office due to “accumulated fatigue”, and the idea of ​​privatization was forgotten.

At the beginning of 2015, Artyom Ekimov, a senior detective of the Main Directorate for Combating Corruption and Economic Security of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, was appointed director of Ritual, who stated that his task was to cleanse the industry of crime. In a conversation with Meduza, Ekimov admits that it has not yet been possible to take control of the entire market, and unscrupulous companies continue to operate on the territory of some morgues.

One such example is the forensic medical examination bureau in Tsaritsyno, where the funeral business continues to operate approximately as it did in the 1990s. Most of the relatives came to the local mortuary with already drawn up contracts for the organization of the funeral from two companies from Chekhov near Moscow. In the second half of 2017, their companies’ order volumes skyrocketed. According to the Ritual employee, “someone from [the mortuary] staff probably passed them the data of the relatives of the deceased as soon as the body arrived.”

MOSCOW AND REGION

292 pairs of eyeballs for sale

Morgues are another part of the funeral industry where there are also ample business opportunities. For example, one of the largest operators of mortuaries in Moscow, including the Tsaritsyno one, is the Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination. Until recently, its CEO was Yevgeny Kildyushov, head of the department of forensic science at the Pirogov Medical University (commonly referred to as “Second Honey”).

Many of Kildyushov’s colleagues in the department were listed as co-founders of the Broniks-Service company – until 2014, it was the operator of paid services that were provided in the morgues of the Moscow Bureau and in the morgues of departmental hospitals where graduates of the Second Med worked.

Since civil servants (including Kildyushov) do not have the right to own commercial companies, in 2014 the main owner of Broniks-Service changed – Alexei Nikolaev, the son of Boris Nikolaev, became the head of the postgraduate and residency department of the Russian Center for Forensic Medical Examination under the Ministry of Health.

In 2014, at the request of the authorities, the Bureau had to hold a competition to select a paid service operator. He was won by the Help-Ritual company, founded a few weeks before the tender; it was created by the then head of one of the departments of the city Department of Health Vladislav Finogenov and Rashid Sadykov, a business partner of Eduard Gallyamov, the chief surgeon of the medical center of the Moscow City Hall.

However, agents of another company, the Funeral Service Service (RCS), soon appeared at the doors of the morgues owned by the Bureau and began to intercept customers. According to employees of several funeral homes and a city hall official, the interests of this company were lobbied by Oksana Doronina, deputy director of the Bureau for Economics.

The competition did not last long – the RSS agents disappeared, and Doronina herself quit. This happened after a criminal case of negligence was initiated against the leadership of the Bureau: 13 employees of the company became infected with tuberculosis. The pre-investigation check revealed numerous sanitary violations.

In October 2017, Kildyushov resigned from his post as head of the Department of Forensic Science at Second Med. The negligence case is still under investigation. As the Life edition wrote, citing sources in the investigation, the Bureau was also suspected of illegal removal of the organs of the deceased.

Employees of the Bureau and their colleagues interviewed by Meduza doubt the validity of such accusations, but they do not deny that organs were actually removed from corpses in morgues. “We have everything according to the law, we have concluded state contracts for the seizure,” explains one of the former employees. — Are you aware that there is a presumption of consent to transplantation in Russia?

Relatives’ permission is not required for organ harvesting. We do not have the right [to harvest organs] only if relatives provide us with a notarized statement of the deceased for a ban (under the law, close relatives of the deceased themselves can also prohibit harvesting organs – Note by Meduza). But I have never experienced this.”

According to the public procurement website, the Bureau indeed concludes contracts for the removal of organs every year: for example, this year the company must supply the Helmholtz Institute of Eye Diseases with at least 292 eyeballs, and the Bashkir clinic for plastic surgery with 1000 dura maters, 250 tibias, 100 Achilles tendons and 400 tunics of male testicles.

“Pathologists in Moscow earn good salaries, including bonuses for providing commercial services [preparing corpses for burial and embalming],” adds the owner of one of the funeral companies. “The sale of organs, the removal of golden crowns from corpses is a regional specificity, especially common in the southern regions and in Ukraine. A few years ago, there was such a case in the Moscow region, but it turned out that visitors from the Rostov region did it.

In 2013, the police of the Serpukhov district of the Moscow region actually opened a criminal case on suspicion that employees of a ritual company stole jewelry and gold crowns from the bodies of the dead, which were then handed over to a pawnshop. The Stella-Memory company, the largest ritual company in the south of Moscow Region, which also manages several cemeteries in Serpukhov, was blamed for this.

It was founded by the Kovshar spouses, who moved to Moscow from the city of Donetsk in the Rostov region; Olga Kovshar has also been a member of the Serpukhov city council since 2010, and in 2013 she headed the political council of the local branch of United Russia. How the criminal case against Kovshari ended, Meduza was unable to find out. Olga Kovshar tried to obtain denials from publications that talked about the accusations against her, but the court rejected her claims twice.

MOSCOW

Access to death

The most difficult thing for the state was to “clean up” companies that work not with morgues and hospitals, but with so-called domestic deaths. Here, too, everything is based on informal access to information. It is generally accepted that ordinary advertising is not suitable for this market, because few people think about the funeral of their relatives in advance: judging by the results of a 2017 opinion poll, most often residents of Moscow over 50 years old learn about funeral companies when they call them themselves – how- when you hear about the death of a loved one.

Sometimes (this happens especially often in the regions), the ambulance travels slowly – and the funeral service employee arrives before the doctors.

“It all depends on the professionalism of the agent,” says the director of one of the funeral companies. – Once our employee arrived at the address, and the person was still alive. As a result, the agent with him in the catalog chose a coffin, wreaths and the rest. Everyone was satisfied.” The cost of purchasing information (in Moscow – 15-20 thousand rubles per deceased) is passed on to the client.

It is almost impossible to trace who is transmitting the information. “Who has access [to her]? The ambulance dispatcher who takes the call, the ambulance driver and doctor, the police dispatcher, the police officer on duty, the policeman himself, the dispatcher of the city corpse truck and two employees of the corpse truck brigade, – Ekimov, the head of Ritual, lists. “There are already nine people, if you don’t count their leadership, which can set up a whole system for selling information.”

Even in hospitals, Ritual employees are faced with the fact that the nurse of the department reports the death and immediately writes a message to someone, after which the relatives of the deceased come with an already concluded contract. As Meduza’s analysis shows, only a few dozen criminal cases have been filed across Russia against ambulance and police officers for exceeding official authority and disclosing personal data.

The standard punishment for them is a fine. According to Ritual, almost 500 companies and entrepreneurs provide funeral services in Moscow (mainly for those who died at home). However, as Meduza found out, many of them are interconnected and form several dozen large informal holdings. So, the company “Darko” was engaged in the funeral of Leonid Armor.

Its former co-owners and their relatives own several other funeral homes in Moscow and the Tambov region, as well as a company that owns a fleet of hearses. The CEO of Darko, Svetlana Kozlova, is a business partner of Igor Medvedkov, who headed the Moscow-based Ritual in 2013-2015. Kozlova herself previously headed companies owned by Medvedkov – and her husband was Medvedkov’s partner in the Posbon R ritual company in Reutov.

When registering, Posbon R indicated the same phone number as four companies of businessman Saken Korganbaev, who sells flowers. Korganbaev owns a small building in the industrial zone in Golyanovo, where the offices of several other ritual companies are located: they all have their own websites and phones, but they all draw up documents on behalf of the GSS Posbon company.

In the past, the co-owner of GSS Posbon was the head of the Russian fan club of the AC / DC group, Alexei Chuikov. Its current co-owner, Andrei Besfamilny, sued the migration service in 2016: he was accused of illegally attracting foreign workers to produce coffins and ritual accessories in Shchelkovo.

Besfamilny at first stated that the employees of the Federal Migration Service themselves brought the workers to the workshop, handed out tools and took pictures. Then the position changed: according to the new version, the foreigners simply lived at the enterprise, not doing any work (another witness claimed that the migrants came on a job advertisement, and, while waiting for an interview, arbitrarily “engaged in making models of coffins for free”).

The businessman asked the court to take into account his “poor financial situation”; as a result, he got off with a fine. According to Meduza’s estimates, the informal holding associated with Medvedkov includes more than 30 legal entities. Together, as of the beginning of 2018, they controlled about 6% of all burials in Moscow. A complete list of the main players in the Moscow ritual market, compiled by Meduza, can be viewed here.

RUSSIA

A piece of land in the Seychelles

In 2016, a well-organized and high-tech competitor appeared for traditional funeral companies and holdings, which, according to its representatives, is going to rely on ordinary advertising to potential customers, and not on illegal purchase of information about deaths.

Oleg Shelyagov, a former top manager of the same NPF “Welfare”, where Andrei Marsy worked, bought out half of the shares of “Ritual-Service” – the same company founded in 1993 by the wife of Semyon Mogilevich and the mayor’s office of Yuri Luzhkov – and decided to do a ritual business in a new way.

According to Valery Pilnikov, the company’s operating director, in the two years since the transaction, the number of orders from Ritual-Service has grown from 20 to 1200 orders per month. Pilnikov argues that the new management has abandoned the practice of buying information about the dead, relying on Internet promotion, advertising in local newspapers and leaflets in mailboxes.

For funeral agents, the company has developed a special digital platform like the one that Yandex.Taxi did for drivers. Shelyagov became widely known last year by throwing a party at the Vladimir Palace in St. Petersburg to celebrate his XNUMXth wedding anniversary with his wife, Victoria.

The celebration was held in the Russian style: guests were greeted by 15 balalaika players in folk costumes. In an interview with Tatler magazine, which spoke in detail about the party, Victoria Shelyagova said that her family has “a piece of land in the Seychelles, in my old age I will grow greens and tomatoes there.”

According to the income statement, Oleg Shelyagov earned only 2017 million rubles in 9,2, and his wife – 0 rubles; for two, they own two apartments in Moscow and one car. Competitors claim that “Ritual-Service” also does not disdain the traditional rules of the game in the market.

In early 2018, the flow of bodies passing through the mortuary of the Center for Traumatology and Orthopedics (CITO) increased dramatically. Funeral services in it at that time were provided by the Bruno company, established in January 2017. Its founder and CEO Oleg Penyaev was at the same time an employee of Ritual-Service (the company confirms this information, but denies any connection between themselves and Bruno) – and Bruno’s agents presented themselves to clients as employees of the municipal Ritual, which is why in the spring In 2018, a fraud case was opened against the company.

Now Shelyagov is going to scale his business to different regions of Russia – although it is commonly believed that there are no federal players in the funeral market, because it is built on connections with local officials.

At the beginning of 2018, the owner of Ritual-Service registered the company in St. Petersburg, but has not yet entered the market: according to him, one has to take into account “monopoly in this market.” While the businessman is trying to “test the technology” in other regions, influential people are becoming his partners everywhere.

In Chelyabinsk, this is the former head of the local ritual state enterprise; in Nizhny Novgorod – former vice-mayor. In Yekaterinburg, Shelyagov works with Viktor Bublik, who used to be a lawyer in companies associated with the organized crime group Uralmash.

Looking at the successes of Shelyagov, old market players also began to rely on digital technologies. Artyom and Ilya, the children of the owner of the Gorbrus holding Yuri Manilov, created the Honest Agent company, which launched its own IT platform for the comprehensive provision of funeral services, from transporting the body to the morgue to choosing a place in the cemetery.

However, the main advantage of the company is still well-established ties with cemeteries: “Honest Agent” manages municipal cemeteries in several districts of the Moscow region. And land – along with information about the deceased – is still the main asset of the funeral industry.

MOSCOW

Guardians of the graves

On one of the central alleys of the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow in 2012, the grave of a young girl, Marina Krasilnikova, appeared. The monument, on which letters from the relatives of the deceased are engraved, occupies several sections at once at the intersection of two central alleys.

On the side of the plot there are four dilapidated monuments with other names. Marina’s father, Sergey Krasilnikov, one of the co-owners of the clothing market near the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya metro station, which was demolished in 2016, received a plot of land as part of the “guardianship of the graves” program. According to the decree issued in 2009, the grave can be recognized as ownerless and transferred under the “guardianship” of another person.

He must restore the monument or erect a new one; if he decides to bury someone on the site, the name of the deceased from the previous burial should be written on the back of the new monument. The decision to transfer the grave to guardianship is made by a commission consisting of employees of the “Ritual” and “representatives of the public” (which ones, it is not clear).

This scheme was invented by the same Aleksey Suloev, when he was the head of Ritual. A few years before the start of the guardianship program, Suloev’s Spot.ru company won a tender to conduct an inventory of Moscow’s old cemeteries. When Suloev joined the civil service, he announced a program for re-registration of graves and the issuance of electronic burial passports for relatives of the deceased.

According to him, this was supposed to help forgetful people find the graves of their loved ones – for this, electronic terminals were supposed to be installed in cemeteries (this never happened). If the owners of the graves did not have time to re-register, then their graves were recognized as ownerless and could get a “guardian”.

Under Suloev, at the end of the 2000s, the old cemeteries began to be actively rebuilt – to demolish outbuildings and narrow paths, selling the vacated land for graves. Most of the cemeteries were not registered in the land registry, and therefore did not have clear boundaries, which allowed their administration to seize adjacent land.

So, in 2011, the environmental prosecutor’s office found that the Butovo cemetery illegally seized three hectares of forest, on which by that time 4 graves were located. (The conflict was settled by an amicable agreement.) In 2014, the Moscow government deprived Ritual of the opportunity to sell land for new graves, canceled the guardianship program and launched electronic auctions for the sale of land for family burials in old cemeteries.

For several years, more than 2 thousand plots were put up for them. However, this procedure did not cause a stir. The most expensive plot – 4 square meters at the entrance to the Troekurovsky cemetery – was purchased by Valery Korotkov, a former shareholder of the Itera gas holding, for 4,65 million rubles.

For the cheapest lot – 0,88 square meters for 24 thousand rubles at the Cherkizovsky cemetery near Sheremetyevo Airport – there were no buyers. Another important ritual asset is the retail outlets around the cemeteries. According to Meduza’s investigation, the most attractive sites for such trade are owned by people who are affiliated with former Ritual officials and cemetery managers.

The greatest trading competition is at the largest cemetery in Moscow, Khovanskoye, where more than 35 points operate. Two of them belong to Igor Dashdamirov, who was associated with the Solntsevo organized criminal group and was detained on suspicion of the murder of TV presenter Vlad Listyev. The largest local merchant is Ritual-1, one of the oldest companies in the market, which is still a prominent seller of ritual goods and granite monuments.

Little is known about the owners of Ritual-1. Among them are Orthodox philanthropist Vera Slepukhina and Solntsevo native Pavel Rudnev, who, together with the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs, produces documentaries and feature series about policemen.

MOSCOW, TOGLIATTI, OMSK

suicide in the cemetery

Every year, Moscow needs 5 hectares of land for new burials. The authorities have decided to expand several existing cemeteries – but this process is not without difficulties. The expansion of the Khovansky cemetery, the largest in the city, by 43 hectares, was opposed by residents of nearby cottage settlements.

And the authorities near Moscow are against the increase in Domodedovo: they believe that 60 new hectares of graves will attract too many birds that will interfere with the landing of planes at Domodedovo airport. Now the Moscow government intends to solve the problem radically – by creating, 35 kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road, next to the mothballed Malinki landfill, the second largest cemetery in the world at 580 hectares (the largest is in Iraq).

It will be called “White birches”; in the coming years, about 2 billion rubles will be spent on its creation. In the regions, there is often no money not only for the creation of new cemeteries, but also for the maintenance of existing ones. In mid-June 2018, places officially ran out at all cemeteries in Togliatti (about seven hundred people die in the city every month).

In recent years, local residents have buried relatives in a private cemetery that appeared on the territory of the former Rossiya collective farm, opened in 2010 by a co-owner of a local shipyard. Several thousand graves are already located there – however, at the beginning of 2018, the court banned new burials in this territory, arguing that there should not be private cemeteries.

The Togliatti mayor’s office is supposed to buy the land and reopen the cemetery, but there is no money in the budget for this yet. Now the only place in Tolyatti where you can dig graves is a site on the site of a burnt pine forest, located outside the fence of the city’s Toazovsky cemetery.

Formally, this land belongs to the forestry, but since the beginning of the 2010s, people have been buried there without permission, and recently the administration of the cemetery has begun to allocate plots there. Relatives themselves clean up the territory: the administration cannot hire a contractor to, for example, clean up fallen trees – this is not its territory.

Many residents of Tolyatti now bury relatives in rural cemeteries around the city: unofficially, this can cost up to 30 thousand rubles (officially – free of charge). However, according to the conclusions of the deputy commission of the Samara provincial Duma, out of fourteen such churchyards, only five are registered in the land cadastre.

Another alternative is cremation, but the Samara region does not have its own crematorium: local funeral companies send bodies by car to Moscow several times a week, to the private Gorbrus crematorium. Attempts to create completely private cemeteries run into legal uncertainty.

In the early 2010s, Omsk businessman Igor Malyshev, who had previously been buying up scrap metal, decided to create his own cemetery. His company leased 40 hectares of land near Omsk, officially allocated for a cemetery, equipped the site and agreed on all documents. A temple was to be built at the entrance; the place for the church and for the cemetery was consecrated by the local metropolitan in the presence of district officials.

In the fall of 2012, people began to be buried at the cemetery. There were only three funerals – after that, the activity of the cemetery was stopped: the decision to create it was canceled by the new head of the district.

On November 19, 2012, the administration filed a lawsuit to terminate the lease agreement, move the existing graves to another location and restore the site to its original state. Two weeks later, Malyshev called his partner and said that he was going to “chase partridges and take food and wages to the workers.”

Instead, he arrived at the cemetery, shot himself in the chest, and died soon after in the hospital. A ten-ruble coin and a note addressed to the head of the district and a farmer who opposed the creation of a cemetery were found in his office safe: “Take my land, then take my life.”

A few years after Malyshev’s death, a new cemetery appeared on the same spot. The site where people are buried belongs to the village council, but the entrances to the cemetery and the administration building are located on private territory. It is now owned by the Omsk company Avalon. One of the owners of Avalon is Grigory Gorovoy, the “garbage king” of Omsk, who controls the largest landfills in the region.

EKATERINBURG

“Dondiki” against the presidential administration

In many large Russian cities, the redistribution of ritual markets is still ongoing. Sometimes this happens quickly – in this case, new players most often require the highest patrons. In 2016, after a series of arson attacks on hearses and other attacks on competitors, a high-profile trial took place in Yekaterinburg against the founders of a group of funeral companies, which were called “Dondiki” in the press.

Their employees, pretending to be employees of the municipal funeral service, took the bodies of the dead from relatives, and then demanded money from them for the funeral (formally, for related services such as transporting a corpse). During the trial, it turned out that the accused businessmen were connected both with municipal ritual officials and with people involved in the criminal case of the so-called Uralmash organized criminal group.

In the same year, the heads of several Yekaterinburg cemeteries were arrested. To the fact that the administration demands money for providing a place for a grave, Dmitry Malyshev attracted the attention of the public – he twice tried to bury different friends in different cemeteries and twice raised a fuss in the press when he was not allowed to do it for free.

Later it turned out that Malyshev himself has interests in the funeral business – both in his native Perm region and in Yekaterinburg, where he heads the Memory Animals company, which created a pet cemetery and a columbarium for storing urns with the ashes of people.

Malyshev’s partner in this business is Olga Kurchenkova, the wife of Konstantin Kurchenkov, a former high-ranking employee of Rostekhnadzor, who, in turn, is a business partner of the former world chess champion and State Duma deputy Anatoly Karpov (greetings of Kurchenkov and Karpov are posted on the official website of the pet cemetery) .

The company, headed by Malyshev, was founded by other active players in the Yekaterinburg ritual market – the owners of the Ascension group, Natalia Domracheva and Alexei Anisimov. The company became famous, in particular, for the fact that their funeral home blocked the road to the only forensic morgue in Yekaterinburg – and Voznesenie’s competitors’ hearses were only allowed to pass for money.

It got to the point that the bodies in the morgue were thrown over the fence at night; the mayor had to resolve the conflict. Alexey Anisimov co-founded Ascension when he was 21 years old. His uncle, also Aleksey Anisimov, at that moment worked as deputy head of the internal policy department of the presidential administration of Russia, and in the spring of 2014 he became the head of the executive committee of the All-Russian Popular Front.

Judging by the data that the hacker group “Humpty Dumpty” laid out in the public domain, Anisimov Sr. discussed the work of “Ascension” in his correspondence.

RUSSIA

RUSSIA Social activist from Occupy Pedophilia

Since the end of 2016, an unusually large number of articles about the ritual business began to appear in the Moscow media. Ren-TV, the channel “360”, “Lenta.ru” and other publications wrote about the “party in the coffin” arranged in the morgue, about the coffins dug out after conflicts with the ritualists, and about the “dirt pits” in which people are buried in outskirts of Moscow.

The source of all this news was the society for the protection of the rights of the dead “Verum”. According to its president, Vladimir Gorelov, he decided to create a human rights organization after, like the Yekaterinburg resident Malyshev, he faced “lawlessness” while organizing the funeral of his friend.

In social networks “Verum” places advertisements for the purchase of videos with illegal actions of employees of ritual agencies; In addition to the president, the organization employs two lawyers and a press secretary who disseminates information through the media. According to Gorelov, Verum makes money on legal advice for people who have problems organizing funerals.

A Meduza correspondent who visited the Verum office noticed only a few employees of ritual companies there who were trying to resolve the situation after the noise in the media and social networks. “Here are [people] from Ruza – did you see, we recently uploaded a video [about them]? Gorelov explained. “Now we’ve come to meet you and tell you how they’re improving.”

For a year and a half of Verum’s work, almost all the largest players in the funeral industry in Moscow and the Moscow region have become the heroes of their publications. Checks came to someone; According to Meduza’s interlocutors, several companies actually lost their business. The ritual entrepreneurs who have come under the spotlight of Verum confirm to Meduza that they went to Gorelov for negotiations, but they do not say how the negotiations ended.

“They probably have a very high roof,” one of them explains his reluctance to give details. They are definitely not from the market. We hired a private detective to find out who was behind them.” “[Verum’s president] Gorelov is the zits chairman, a retired military man with decorations who was found on resumes on job search websites,” a person familiar with the job explains to Meduza. As Meduza found out, Gorelov previously headed the department for attracting investments of the Social Initiative company, signing contracts with equity holders.

Homes for them were never built; More than 9 thousand people were recognized as victims of the company’s activities. Gorelov himself, who owned 4% of Social Initiative, was involved in a criminal case against the company as a witness; its main owner was eventually imprisoned for 10 years.

A completely different person manages the activities of Verum. Until 2016, the legal entity that would later become Verum was called the Kostroma Public Organization for the Protection of Consumer Rights. It was founded by three residents of the Kostroma region. As one of them told Meduza, several years ago the organization was sold to a Muscovite named Denis.

Several people who spoke with Verum told Meduza that Denis Loginov participated in the negotiations on behalf of the organization. Denis Loginov previously headed the interregional branch of the Restrukt movement, created by the neo-Nazi Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich.

Participants in the movement, in particular, carried out Occupy Pedophilia actions – on behalf of minors, they got acquainted with potential “pedophiles” on social networks, and during personal meetings they beat and intimidated, filming it on video and then extorting money from victims who did not want to publicity.

In August 2014, Martsinkevich was sentenced to five years in prison. Denis Loginov was also a defendant in one of the criminal cases – but in the end he was transferred to the status of a witness. Several Restrukt participants told Meduza that after the trial, they learned that Loginov used to work in the anti-extremism police department.

Many of Tesak’s supporters stopped communicating with Loginov after that, but not all of them. Together with other associates, according to one of the former participants of Restrukt, they began to think about the “more legal” scope of the technology worked out at Occupy Pedophilia.

To do this, with the participation of Loginov, the consumer society “Restructuring” was created – however, several of the first concepts, according to the interlocutor of Meduza, were not successful. Checking products in supermarkets was promptly suppressed by retail chains, a project to counter construction companies also did not give the desired results; in 2016 “Restructuring” was liquidated.

Soon the “Kostroma Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights” turned into “Verum”. “I heard that lately they have been dealing with a topic related to the ritual,” says a former participant in Restruct. Three representatives of the funeral industry identified Denis Loginov from a photograph as a person who participated in the negotiations at the Verum office.

Loginov’s Facebook avatar was filmed in a negotiation organization; the former Restrukt leader also posted photos of himself in front of the Verum booth at the Necropolis funeral exhibition. News from the life of “Verum” regularly appears in the “Hands off Tesak” community on VKontakte, there are such posts on the page of Martsinkevich himself.

Several of Loginov’s acquaintances and the person whom he invited to work at Verum confirmed that it was Loginov who was the organization’s ideologist. Meduza sent questions to Denis Loginov on Facebook, after which the president of Verum, Gorelov, sent an SMS to the phone number left by the correspondent stating that he was ready to provide all the necessary information about the organization.

Later, Loginov himself called Meduza back, saying that he was ready to give any information about the ritual market, but asked not to mention his name in the context of Verum. The main goal of “Verum” is to become the All-Russian public controller of the ritual business: both Loginov’s acquaintance and businessmen who communicated with “Verum” speak about this. Vladimir Gorelov and his colleagues participate in almost every event dedicated to the problems of the funeral industry.

Twice they were the initiators of the discussion of the new law “On Burial and Funeral Business”, which has been being prepared for more than five years in the federal ministry of construction and housing and communal services. The new law, according to officials, should regulate the work of funeral services, create criteria and registers for them, agents will be forbidden to come to apartments without calling the relatives of the deceased, and also work on the territory of medical institutions and morgues; offenders will be blacklisted.

The control of the industry by public organizations is also envisaged. Denis Loginov is the son of Andrey Loginov, Deputy Head of the Government Staff of the Russian Federation, who is responsible for ensuring law-making activities. Two of Meduza’s interlocutors in the ritual industry say that starting in the fall of 2017, Andrei Loginov lobbied for the speedy adoption of a new burial law prepared by the Ministry of Construction.

Andrey Loginov’s wife Svetlana at that moment headed the Central Research and Design Institute of the Ministry of Construction, and his good friend Mikhail Men was the head of the ministry. In the early morning of May 16, 2018, employees of the Investigative Committee and the police searched the apartment of the president of Verum, Vladimir Gorelov, and five other employees of the public organization, as well as the editorial office of The Daily Storm, which published several materials about the funeral business in Moscow.

The searches were carried out as part of a criminal libel case initiated at the request of employees of the Moscow “Ritual”. Soon, in the new composition of the government of Mikhail Men, the governor of the Tyumen region, Vladimir Yakushev, was replaced at the head of the Ministry of Construction. The fate of the bill is currently unclear.

The industry does not welcome change: according to a summary of a study commissioned by the Moscow government in 2017, directors of funeral companies “urged caution in introducing any innovations in the field of funeral business, as innovations in this industry in Western Europe hastened the end of traditional society, accompanied by disintegration of structures such as the family.

The employees of the Federal Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, who were analyzing the draft of the new law, were told by ritual entrepreneurs that it would not solve the problems existing on the market, but would legally fix the position of existing monopolists.

One of those interviewed was Alexei Semyonov, who owns a funeral company in the city of Tikhvin in the Leningrad Region.

According to Semyonov, in 2017, the local administration transferred the city cemetery to the management of the Art Stone Master company, which immediately raised prices several times – and which is part of Igor Minakov’s holding, which controls almost the entire ritual industry of St. Petersburg.

“With the adoption of the new law, this firm will become a monopoly in everything,” Semyonov says. “People are already trying to bury [relatives] in villages, and in the near future they will have to [do this] in their gardens.”

Source: meduza.io