The head of "Ritual": "The main burden fell on the cremation equipment"

In October 2020, Artem Ekimov, head of the Ritual State Budgetary Institution, the largest Moscow funeral service, told RBC about how this area has changed during the year of the CORONAVIRUS pandemic. A year later, RBC spoke with him again to find out if the industry is coping with the increased number of deaths, whether Muscovites tend to save on burials, and how much the average funeral costs.

The Capital State Budgetary Institution “Ritual” is the main operator of funerals and Moscow cemeteries, the successor to the Spetstrust enterprise, which has been working in this area since the mid-1930s in the USSR.

Pandemic changes

- What has changed, in your opinion, in the funeral industry over the past year?

— The main trend is quantitative changes. The number of burials is growing following the increase in mortality, obviously. But this growth is spasmodic, associated with the so-called pandemic waves. First, second, third, fourth. Naturally, the volume of our work is increasing - in proportion to the share of the institution in a particular segment of the funeral services market. These new conditions, new circumstances require us to concentrate even more on the process, let's call it production. But our status as a state institution and the general policy pursued over the course of several years, including those aimed at modernizing our production facilities, made it possible to withstand such increased loads during the stage of uncertainty of the first wave in 2020. At our peak, we could bury up to 600 bodies daily.

The load fell primarily on the cremation equipment, because we distribute coffin burials to all 136 cemeteries. But three crematoria, especially in the context of Rospotrebnadzor's focus on cremation [instead of burials] as the preferred form of burial, accounted for the bulk of the volume. Sometimes the share of cremations reached 70–72% in the total volume of burials.