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Concept
Butovo firing range
Summary
The Butovo Firing Range or Butovo Shooting Range (Бутовский полигон) 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. As the late Arseny Roginsky explained: "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.
Official source
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