The "Cimetière de Liers" was created as the second communal cemetery on February 8, 1879 in the city of Sainte Geneviève des Bois in France, 25 km south from Paris. To house the burials of the White Russians who arrived in Moscow after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, some of the land was granted in 1927 to an English benefactress, Dorothy Paget who had set up with Elena Orlov and her sister Princess Vera Meshchersky a still active retirement home for Russian émigrés nearby in the Château de la Cossonnerie. This part of the cemetery is since known as "the Russian Cemetery".