Russian Gothic: bears in some northern Russian towns have taken to digging up graveyards, rooting amid coffins, and eating human remains.
The linked article opens with a short horror story:
From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova came closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body....
The shocked women cried in panic, frightening the bear back into the woods, before they discovered a ghoulish scene with the clothes of the bear's already-dead victim chucked over adjacent tombstones...
Why is this happening? Could this be another front in Earth's campaign against the human race?
The bears raided graveyards because they offered a supply of easy food, [Masha Vorontsova, Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in Russia] said, a bit like a giant refrigerator.
After leaving that excellent simile, Vorontsova notes:
"The story is horrible. Nobody wants to think about having a much loved member of their family eaten by a bear."
While we wait for the inevitable Putin meme, we can consider this as another instance of real-life Gothic horror. Bears attacking the dead draws on our classic anxieties around dead bodies, amplified by the typical horror setting of a cemetery. There's also a regressive fear involved, as historical progress seems undone and humanity thrust back into an earlier, more fragile time.
On that Putin meme: this story can easily feed anti-Russian sentiment in the West. It can show Russia as a decayed, sad place. It can also display Russia as a fearsome nation.
In conclusion, let Nekrogoblikon sing us out:
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