Many examples of pre-revolutionary tomb-stones can be seen, for example, in the Kynoviskoye Cemetery. But a closer inspection reveals that all the inscriptions date from a different era, the 1950s to the 1980s.
Two monuments in the same cemetery, erected at the burial places of Soviet solders killed during the defense of the city during World War Two are also second-hand items.
Similarly, cross the Neva River to the "communist cemetery" founded in the 1920s on the grounds of the Alexandra-Nevskava Lavra (monastery) and 90% of the tomb-stones of the outstanding communists buried there are pre-used.
Alexandra-Nevskava Lavra's Tikhvinskoye Cemetery was almost destroyed in the early 1930s. All that remained were the tombs the famous. They were joined by the remains of other well known figures, exhumed from less exalted cemeteries around the city earmarked for complete destruction.
The destruction of cemeteries was common in the early post-revolution period.
Zealous communist authorities planned the systematic destruction on the Smolenskoye Lutheran Cemetery and the Smolenskoye Russian Orthodox Cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. Something remains of the Smolenskoye cemeteries. Many others disappeared completely.
The destruction resulted in thousands of surplus tomb-stones. But rather than waste the old regime's symbols, they were removed for re-use with the sanction of the authorities.
The process was widespread all over the country. In 1933 the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky wrote to Lazar Kaganovich (at that time a communist authority in Moscow). "Please supply our sculptors with marble... It is possible to give them marble tomb-stones from the cemeteries of Moscow," Gorky wrote.
But pre-revolutionary graves were sacked not just for the burial plots of those of the new order.
When St Petersburg's Volosarksy Bridge was reconstructed in recent years it was discovered that the granite facing of the foundation consisted of tomb-stones taken from a nearby cemetery on Prospect Obukhovsky Oborony that had been uprooted in the 1930s. Earth from the cemetery (together with the remains of those buried there) had also been incorporated into the bridge during its 1932-36 construction.
The communists' policy extended beyond simple head-stones.
The obelisk erected on the spot near Chyornaya Rechka (Black River) where Russia's famous poet Alexander Pushkin fought his fatal duel was taken in 1937 from the grave of the noted scholar Friederich Klinger (1752-1831), who had until that time been resting in peace in the Smolenskoye Lutheran Cemetery.
The obelisk, a "Bolshevik present to Pushkin" on the 100th anniversary of his death replaced the original pre-revolutionary monument ruined in the early 1920s.
But the re-use of the stones was not confined to the pre-war period.
In the early 1950s when the tram tracks were removed from Bolshaya Konyshennaya Ulitsa (which runs north off Nevsky Prospect near the Moika Canal) and a boulevard constructed, it was bordered with granite tomb-stones.
The stones were taken from graves at the St Mitrophane Cemetery (which then existed not far from the Warsaw Railway Station). More stones were later taken from the same cemetery to edge the sidewalk on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, another Nevsky side-street.
Hundreds of the old stones can still be found near Arsenalnaya Embankment, on the grounds two factories which now occupy the spot where the Vyborgskoye Roman Catholic Cemetery used to be.
Until very recently a small workshop adjoining one of the factories turned out recycled tomb-stones.