 It is estimated that over 100,000 people have been buried at this cemetery since 1773.Between late 1771 and 1772, Catherine the Great, empress of the Russian empire, issued an edict which decreed that, from that point on, any person who died (regardless of social standing or class origins) no longer had the right to be buried within church crypts or adjacent churchyards.New cemeteries had to be built across the entire Russian Empire and from then on they all had to be located outside city limits.