Another World

Fr. Patrick Gaffney, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, talks about the changing cultures of death in Russia.  Professor Gaffney explains how Russians have dealt with corpses, funerals, and the afterlife during the past two centuries.  He tells of the journeys to heaven and hell that souls took during the Tsarist era, why the Soviet ‘red funerals’ failed, what happened to Lenin and Stalin’s corpses, and why there are so few obituaries or funeral homes in modern Russia.