Andrey Smirnov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
People lay flowers on the grave of Aslan Usoyan at a cemetery just outside the Moscow city limits on Sunday.
MOSCOW — Aslan Usoyan, a Russian underworld boss who was killed by a sniper on Wednesday as he walked out of a restaurant in downtown Moscow, was buried in a snowy plot of land under a wooden cross on Sunday in a cemetery just beyond the Moscow city limits.
The scene at Khovanskoye Cemetery — where black-clad toughs formed a procession in their Mercedes Geländewagens, and security officers told journalists to avoid the area for their own safety — was a modest one for a mobster of Mr. Usoyan’s status, perhaps in part because of the government’s efforts to avoid the pageantry that has unfolded around the funerals of Russian mob bosses in the past.
Mr. Usoyan, a Kurd born in 1937 in Tbilisi, Georgia, rose through the ranks of the Vory v Zakone, or Thieves-in-Law, a shadowy criminal organization that emerged in the Soviet prisons, to become boss of the Moscow underworld. Mr. Usoyan survived four stints in prison, the gang wars of the 1990s and two assassination attempts, including one in 2010.
Many of Mr. Usoyan’s contemporaries are interred at the best cemeteries in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but Mr. Usoyan’s relatives wanted him to be laid to rest in his birthplace. But a plane carrying Mr. Usoyan’s body was reportedly turned away from Georgia, fueling rumors that the country had refused to allow Mr. Usoyan to be buried there. (Membership in Thieves-in-Law carries a criminal sentence of more than five years in Georgia.) And then all the cemeteries inside the Moscow beltway turned away his relatives as they sought a burial place.
On Friday, they traveled with his body to Donetsk, Ukraine, and had left for Georgia to bury him before dusk on Saturday when a Tbilisi airport denied landing rights to the plane carrying the coffin, a member of Mr. Usoyan’s family told Georgian television. The plane returned to Donetsk.
Back in Moscow, people within the mayor’s office told the news agency Interfax that “there would be no discussion” of a burial plot within the city limits.
Mr. Usoyan’s family eventually settled on a plot south of the city, where several hundred mourners, many of whom appeared to be from the Caucasus like Mr. Usoyan, arrived to pay their respects on Sunday.
It was a far cry from the 2009 funeral for the kingpin Vyacheslav K. Ivankov, better known as Yaponchik, who was shot to death in Moscow outside of a Thai restaurant.
He was buried at the Vagankovo Cemetery, several miles from the Kremlin, where some of Russia’s most celebrated artists, like the poet Sergei Yesenin and the folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, are interred. Hundreds of rough-looking men carrying wreaths with inscriptions like “Forgive us, we could not protect you” gathered to see Mr. Ivankov buried in a coffin that was rumored to be equipped with an air-conditioner.
Russian mobsters are partial to ornate graves, and even in smaller cities like Yekaterinburg the burial markers show them wearing designer suits, casually smoking cigarettes or standing with their favorite BMW.
Mr. Usoyan, by contrast, was buried under a relatively simple Russian Orthodox cross.
On a bed of roses in front of the grave, mourners placed a black-and-white photograph of Mr. Usoyan wearing a pinstriped suit, and dozens of wreaths carrying inscriptions to “Grandpa Hassan,” Mr. Usoyan’s nickname, were stacked nearby.
Sergei Kanev, a crime reporter for Novaya Gazeta, said that the authorities had barred Mr. Usoyan’s relatives from burying his body in Moscow, to avoid what he called a “bandit spectacle,” like the one at Mr. Ivankov’s funeral.
“The government tried to do everything it could this time to avoid the sense that this is a country of thieves,” Mr. Kanev said in a telephone interview. “They could not have him buried as a hero.”
Mr. Usoyan was generally recognized as Russia’s most powerful crime boss, the successor to Mr. Ivankov. The police have not named any suspects in his killing.
