MITINO, U.S.S.R. -- Chopin's funeral march rolled in solemn strains across an old village cemetery where a woman clad in black stood by a row of granite tombstones and wept for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster believed to be buried there.
'This is horrible,' said the elderly woman wearing a black kerchief and dress. 'It's horrible for people to die this way. What a tragedy.' She sobbed quietly, tears streaming down her face lined with age.
'They're not my people, but still it is horrible,' she said on a day this week before shuffling off toward a rag-tag band and a military guard bearing a coffin to a freshly dug plot, followed by a procession of black-clad mourners.
'Ekaterina Alexandrovna Ivanenko' read the simple epitaph to one Ukrainian woman, among the 23 buried in a section of the cemetery in a small village on the outskirts of Moscow, 600 miles from the Chernobyl plant.
Her birthdate was obscured by a profusion of plastic flowers. Two uniformed police prevented a young woman bearing red carnations from placing them on the grave while two foreigners looked on.
There is no marker noting that the 23 people buried in the new and distinct section of the old Russian cemetery were victims of the world's worst nuclear accident, an April 26 explosion and fire near Kiev in the Ukraine. Authorities said 26 people died in the disaster.
But six of the names on the tombstones match those of six victims that were published in the newspaper Izvestia, leading to a widespread belief that the others buried there also suffered the same fate.
Rows of freshly dug earth and the stark granite tombstones bearing Ukrainian names separate the cemetery section from the disarray of the other graves marked with iron Russian markers, photographs, bottles of fresh flowers and plastic wreaths.
The ages of the deceased also make these graves stand out.
One young man, his tombstone bearing a star for a member of the Soviet military, was 23 when he was died. Numerous other birthdates show that many were in their early 20s.
Two graves, newer than the others, bear only cardboard markers, the names of the deceased written in magic marker.
Security is tight at Mitino cemetery. Uniformed police and plainclothes security officers followed two Western reporters, detaining them twice, painstakingly copying their documents and removing pages with writing from their notebooks.
Russians entering the cemetery were asked for their passports, a security procedure tight even by Soviet standards. Such things testify to the continuing sensitivity of Soviet authorities about the accident, whose radioactive emission spread across Europe.
There have been recurring questions about the number of victims resulting frm the accident, which prompted large-scale evacuations around the plant.
Authorities have released no further details since a doctor told a news conference that 24 patients died after the disaster and the figure was printed in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda on June 6.
Two other victims died instantly. The body of one operator was never found and he will remain forever entombed.
The new cemetery section at Mitino has places for 45 graves.
