The COVID-19 pandemic and the phenomenon of death in Russian culture and society in the early 2020s

Abstract

The death of a person is both a personal event that concerns the deceased and his nearest and dearest exclusively, and a social phenomenon, where the death of an individual is interpreted as an act of communication and a statistical occurrence that reflects the demographic situation. In the former, the person is the one who makes decisions and influences the course of events. His thoughts and actions are determined by his personal attitude towards the pandemic, social experience and personal moral standards. To analyse this attitude towards death, we will review the stages of accepting the existence of COVID-19 and how it affects people’s lives. The main conclusion to be drawn in this regard is the correlation between the stages of individual and social attitudes towards a possible catastrophe, such as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. However, in social terms, these stages arise unevenly, complicating the structure of the perception of the problem and the society itself. The extreme forms of such perception and the opposite elements of such a structure in this case are the COVID-19 dissenters and the COVID-19 loyalists.

In the second case, a person acts as an object over which certain actions are performed: burial preparation and parting with the body itself. Here we look at people’s attitudes towards innovations in the field of funeral services that have appeared or have been popularized due to the pandemic. The main conclusion to be drawn in this regard is the emergence in the mass consciousness of a new perception of death as an actual and everyday given, disrupting, however, the usual course of its acceptance. This is reflected in the reduction of the rituals of parting with the body and the emergence of remote forms of this farewell.