sentences:  Containing numerous graves, it stood for over 170 years from 1774 to shortly after World War II when it was completely flattened and destroyed by the Soviet occupation authorities governing the country at that time.Its origins and destruction are very similar to that of the Kopli cemetery (also in Tallinn).Between 1771 and 1772, Catherine the Great, empress of the Russian empire, issued an edict which decreed that, from that point on, any person who died (regardless of their social standing or class origins), no longer had the right to be buried within church crypts or adjacent churchyards.