and Soviet period Revolutionary burials After the February Revolution, the Petrograd Soviet decided to create an honorary communal burial ground for those who had been killed in the unrest, and the Field of Mars was selected. An important consideration was the plan to site the putative Constituent Assembly on the Field of Mars, which would then overlook a monument to those who had died in the revolution. Four large graves were dug in the centre of the Field of Mars. The burials were scheduled to take place on , but prior to this news circulated that there would not be any funeral rites. Relatives of the dead hurried to claim and bury them in other cemeteries with the traditional rites. Ultimately only 184 victims were buried on the Field of Mars, comprising 86 soldiers, 9 sailors, 2 officers, 32 workers, 6 women, 23 people for whom social status could not be determined, and 26 unknown dead. The city soviet declared 5 April a day off work, and many citizens turned out to accompany the funeral processions, which carried the dead from the hospitals and chapels across the city. The graves had been prepared by blasting trenches in the frozen ground, with the lowering of each coffin marked by a cannon shot from the Peter and Paul Fortress. By one estimate some 800,000 people attended the funerals. A competition for the design of the memorial was won by Lev Rudnev and the Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution was opened on 7 November 1919. Epitaphs by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People's Commissar of Education, were inscribed around the memorial. Soviet pantheon The burials of the dead of the February Revolution started a trend for the Field of Mars to become a pantheon of those who died in the service of the revolution and the achievement of Soviet power. The first individual burial, that of V. Volodarsky, took place on 23 June 1918. Volodarsky, a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, had been assassinated three days earlier. Further burials took place later that year, when a number of the dead of the October Revolution were interred. Other interments over the following years included Moisei Uritsky, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka who was assassinated in August 1918; Semyon Nakhimson, who was killed in the Yaroslavl Uprising in July 1918; Civil War commander A. S. Rakov in 1919 and All-Russian Central