For Weddings and a Funeral

TBILISI, Georgia — It’s a modern marriage. A puppet show tells the couple’s love story in verse: while a young man narrates, five custom-made marionettes — the bride, the groom and their three children — bob about. The two people we’ve come to honor have to pick each other out of two line-ups of a dozen potential grooms and brides draped in bed sheets. Then emerges a young bearded man wearing a red cloak and a TV remote control around his neck. Placing battery-operated Christmas-tree lights on the couple’s heads, he pronounces them husband and wife to the applause of the 60 or so guests in attendance.

The author and director of this hilarious “friendly ritual,” as he called it, had designed for the newlyweds, two friends of ours from Moscow, a caricature of the sometimes gaudy, often unintentionally ridiculous rituals that people in the former Soviet Union now improvise to mark life’s milestones. Customized ceremonies are an attempt to fill a gap left by the Communist Party’s 70-year war against religion and bourgeois traditions. Often they’re bizarre mash-ups, combining the vaguest recollections of rituals of the past and new American practices as reflected in Hollywood films, like the use of extrastretch Hummer limousines for every occasion.

In 2003, a crematorium opened in Novosibirsk with the express goal of inventing new funeral rituals. The following year, it sent ashes into space.

In the late Soviet Union, civil marriages were performed at a registry office. A woman with a red ribbon across her chest would read out a standard speech congratulating the couple on creating a new unit of the socialist state. Registry offices still exist: civil weddings are required even for those who have religious marriages. And while the red-ribboned women now deliver better speeches, sometimes even to the tune of string quartets, the ceremonies remain impersonal.

Though most Russians consider themselves Orthodox, few are observant or live a life that conforms to the church’s restrictive policies on marriage, leaving many to make up their own secular rituals.

Thousands of wedding-planning companies are here to help. For example, they provide stock scripts for the occasion, including one that has the groom paying a ransom for his bride — a throwback to Slavic mythology. Some well-off couples take a pre-wedding trip and hire paparazzi to follow them around and photograph their kisses and caresses, all to be displayed at the wedding.

Justyna Mielnikiewicz for The New York TimesChildren dancing ahead of a Wedding Party in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In death as in love. In the early 1990s, Russian mafiosi began creating larger-than-lifesize tombstone portraits in granite for their fallen comrades — and, sometimes, for the dead men’s cars, too: anything to convey their status in life. Later, the newly and suspiciously rich began burying their dead in outrageously opulent coffins — studded with jewels, lined with silk or leather. They might also outfit the graves with the deceased’s favorite possessions: a Vertu cellphone or the keys to a BMW. In 2003, a crematorium opened in Novosibirsk with the express goal of inventing new funeral rituals. The following year, it sent ashes into space. In 2010, it held its first “on-line funeral,” a webcast funeral.