Visiting this cemetery makes you think about many things...
for example, what would have happened if they hadn't all left Russia, for various reasons...
All the Russian emigrated nobility lies here (((. Princes and princesses. It's very interesting to walk around. At the entrance there is a cemetery plan and Russians by last name.
Visiting cemeteries like visiting museums makes you think about eternal values, about humanity, especially when it finds itself on the verge of survival as a biological species under the influence of a frenzied struggle for power.This is what is happening today in the area of the nuclear power plant of the Zaporizhia region of the Ukrainian SSR.
The famous cemetery called "Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois" is located in France, in the town of Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois, 30 km from the southern part of Paris.
Along with local residents, emigrants from Russia were buried there.
The cemetery is considered Orthodox, although there are burials of other religions.
10 thousand representatives of Russian people in France found peace here.
These are grand dukes, generals, writers, artists, clergy, and artists.
In 1960, the French authorities raised the issue of demolishing the cemetery, as the leased land was about to expire.
The Russian government did not stand aside and allocated a certain amount to repay the debt, as well as further rent and maintenance.
The ashes of some graves were reburied in Russian cemeteries in the 2000s.
Even on the way to the cemetery, the realization came that visiting it could be considered a duty.
Russian Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois has a cenotaph and a chapel for Russian Princess Vera Obolenskaya, the Heroine of the anti-Fascist Resistance in France.
Vera Apollonovna Obolenskaya /Vika/ - 11 /24/ June 1911 Baku - August 4, 1944, Plettsensee prison, Berlin.A Russian princess related to many imperial and royal surnames: the great-niece of Emperor Nicholas the 2nd, the great-niece of King George the 6th of England, the second-cousin niece of the German Emperor William the 2nd, some other relative of the queens of Denmark and Holland. She was never a communist, but she fought in the communist underground of France and her last words before her execution were about Stalin.
A difficult fate. In 1920, after the Civil War, she and her parents emigrated to France.In 1940, since the beginning of the German occupation, she joined an underground communist organization with her husband, there were simply no other underground groups at that time.She conducted intelligence work, participated in acts of sabotage and liquidation of traitors, organized escapes of Soviet prisoners of war who worked on the construction of the Atlantic Wall to partisan detachments. In the summer of 1943, she became deputy head of the underground "Civil and Military Organization", numbering about 63 thousand people in its ranks. She was responsible for interaction with the Brotherhood of Notre Dame underground, the forces of General de Gaulle's Free France and British intelligence. On December 17, 1943, as a result of betrayal, she was arrested in a safe house.In the beginning, she was held in a prison of the Paris Gestapo, then she was transported to Germany.
She was not tortured, the Gestapo knew so well what Obolenskaya was like. She was required to do only one thing: sign an appeal to the English king, other royal houses of Europe and former subjects of the Russian Empire, with calls to start negotiations and unite around Germany to jointly fight the "Bolshevik hordes", and then make this appeal on Berlin radio and take part in secret negotiations. Obolenskaya categorically rejected all these demands. In 1944, Goebbels personally interviewed her twice in prison, but to no avail. This was reported to Adolf G., who gave the command to execute. A military tribunal was immediately held, where Obolenskaya V.A. was sentenced to death. In the last word, she stated: "You won't have long left. Stalin will come and avenge us all!"On the same day, August 4, Obolenskaya V.A. was beheaded on the guillotine. It is not known where she was buried. The war ended. She was posthumously awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor of France, the highest orders of France and a number of European countries. With the beginning of the cold war, a battle for her memory began, since the West could not admit that the Russian princess, a close relative of the European kings, fought in the communist underground, but they did not succeed. In 1948, former French partisans stole the original protocols of the tribunal where Obolenskaya was convicted from the prison archive. These protocols were immediately published in the KPF newspaper "Yumanite". They are now kept in the Paris Museum.
In the Soviet Union, for a long time, for ideological reasons, any information was kept silent to Princess Obolenskaya V.A. Only in 1965 a short article about her appeared in the newspaper Pravda and a message about Obolenskaya being awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree /posthumously/. In 2000, during a visit to France, President Putin V.V. visited the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-de-Bois and laid red flowers at the cenotaph and chapel of Obolenskaya V.A.
That's how one of the War Heroes lived and died, which we didn't know about for a long time.
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Людмила
Level 5 Local Expert
May 17, 2020
It was very interesting to visit here. Russian history on a small piece of land. This is an impression that cannot be described in words. This is what is called "touching eternity", no matter how pathetic it may sound.