It happened so that we went today to one of the local cemeteries - my husband's mother wouldn't want to go any other day, when it's NOT +40'C or more outside, oh noes! The hotter the better. I've seen cemeteries of USA and European countries in movies many times, well, Russian ones are nothing even close.
If in other countries they have civilized kind of cemeteries, with green lawns and neat rows of tombstones following one another, a typical Russian cemetery is a maze in the most literal and practical sense of that word. By Russian traditions, each grave should have at least it's own fence (encircling the space) and a headstone, preferable with a picture. Trees, bushes and flowers are then planted around it, and those can afford it are buying larger plots of land to put benches and other stuff around, or to be able to bury several people in one place.
Bushes and trees sounds nice, but after some years, when there's no one to care and tend to them, the plants are growing widely, and with the land generally untended by anyone, it is overflown with wild flora and even fauna: we saw a pheasant just today, and I hear there are plenty of rabbits around.
In huge cities cemeteries are big and old, many placed at the city's boundaries so it is growing and expanding all the time. For people to be able to get around it's divided in blocks, with roads between them, but inside a block there's often to way to get around other than climbing from grave to grave. Those blocks older or out of the main ways are overgrown completely and look like a piece of a steppe or a grove: with life taking over, it's hard to guess dead are still there, too. And much more harder to find if one of yours is somewhere out there.
The only thing that the cemetery's administration is doing, is taking out trash from the main roads, and collecting money for the burial grounds, the burials themselves and the headstones. From the looks of it, either these money are stolen completely, or no one are doing any other work. During Soviet times, many old cemeteries - those within city limits - were converted into something else: headstones and greenery removed, they became stadiums and children playgrounds and other things. Kids now play football where their grandparents lie. My grand-grand-father's grave was lost to a railroad built upon his resting place, grand-grand-mother buried in a different place and her grave is the only one left of them unmolested.
So, you see, there is no myth of a scary cemetery in Russia, the one so many times repeated in Western horror movies. How can it be scary if I was taken on a walk in the nearest park by my mom as a child, and then, as an adult, I learned there were graves all around underneath? Even if you take an active cemetery, there could be found as much of scary stuff like in any given forest or grove or wherever else you might go to "connect with the nature".
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