Butovo firing range

The Butovo Shooting Site often mistakenly called Butovo Firing Range (Russian: Бутовский полигон, romanized: Butovskiy poligon) was an execution site of the Soviet secret police located near Drozhzhino in Leninsky District, Moscow Oblast from 1938 to 1953. Its use for mass execution has been documented; it was prepared as a site for mass burial. According to Arseny Roginsky, "firing range" was a popular euphemism adopted to describe the mysterious and closely-guarded plots of land that the NKVD began to set aside for mass burials on the eve of the Great Terror.

Butovo was used for mass executions and mass graves during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, with 20,761 prisoners of various nationalities documented as being transported to the site and executed by the NKVD and its successor agencies. The exact number of victims executed at Butovo remains unknown as only fragmentary data has been declassified. Notable victims at Butovo include Gustav Klutsis, Seraphim Chichagov and Saul Bron; in addition, more than 1000 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy.

The Russian Orthodox Church took over the ownership of Butovo in 1995, commissioning construction of a large Russian Revival memorial church, and the mass grave memorial complex can be visited daily.

Butovo is first mentioned in historical texts in 1568 as owned by Fyodor Drozhin, a boyar of Ivan the Terrible, and the area south of Moscow was occupied by the small settlement of Kosmodemyanskoye Drozhino (named after Saints Cosmas and Damian) until the 19th century. In 1889, the estate's owner, N.M. Solovov, turned it into a large stud farm with stables and a racetrack. His descendant, I.I. Zimin, donated the farm to the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October Revolution in exchange for the right to flee the country, and the farm then became the property of the Red Army. In the 1920s, the Red Army ceded the site, now officially named Butovo after a nearby town, to the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union, as an agricultural colony. In 1934, after the OGPU was incorporated into the NKVD, a portion of the property was encircled by a high fence and transformed into a small firing range.

On 31 July 1937, the NKVD issued Decree No. 00447 "On the operation of repressing former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements." and the political repression that followed resulted in large death sentence and execution quotas. Local cemeteries in Moscow were unable to accommodate the sheer volume of purge victims executed in area prisons. To address the issue, the NKVD allocated two new special facilities – Butovo and Kommunarka shooting ground – to serve as a combination of execution site and mass grave.

On 8 August 1937, the first 91 victims were transported to Butovo from Moscow prisons. Over the next 14 months, 20,761 were executed and subsequently buried at the site, with another 10,000 to 14,000 shot and buried at the nearby Kommunarka Firing Range located 5 miles (8.0 km) to the northwest. On average, 50 persons were executed per day during the Great Purge, and some days saw no executions, while on others hundreds were shot. Records indicate the busiest day was on 28 February 1938 when 562 people were executed.

The last 52 victims of Stalin's purges were executed at Butovo on 19 October 1938.  After 1938, Butovo was no longer used as a mass execution site, but continued to be used for the burial of those executed in Moscow prisons. A German prisoner of war camp was established near Butovo during World War II, and prisoners were used as forced labour to build the Warsaw Highway. Those who were too ill or exhausted to work were shot and thrown into the Butovo ditches. The commandant's office was located just 100 meters from the funerary ditches, and later became a retreat for senior NKVD officers often visited by Lavrenty Beria. Nevertheless, executions continued at nearby locations such as Sukhanovka and Kommunarka until at least 1941 and likely onto 1953.

Victims were rounded up as soon as sentences were handed down by non-judicial organs: committees of three persons, "troikas", or of two persons "dvoika", or of the military tribunal of the Supreme Court. They were then transported to Butovo in trucks marked "Bread" or "Meat" to disguise operations from local residents. Some prisoners would be immediately killed upon arrival when their truck was flooded with carbon monoxide, and the bodies then disposed of in nearby ditches. Most victims were led to a long barrack, ostensibly for a medical exam, where there was a roll call and reconciliation of people with file dossiers including photos. These same photos from NKVD files would later serve as memorials to victims. Only after the paperwork was complete would they pronounce the death sentence. After sunrise, NKVD officers, often drunk off the bucket of vodka provided to them, would escort prisoners away from the barracks and shoot them at close range to the back of the head, often with a Nagant M1895 revolver. Those shot were immediately, or a short time afterwards, dumped into one of 13 ditches totaling 900 m (0.56 miles) in length. The width of each ditch was 4–5 meters (~16 feet), and the depth approximately 4 m (13 ft). Executions and burials were made without notice to relatives and without church or civil funeral services. Relatives of those who were shot began only in 1989 to receive certificates indicating the exact date and cause of death.