TO THE HIGHEST MEASURE.
BUTOVO SHOOTING RANGE

According to archival materials from the State Security Committee, 688,000 people were executed in the USSR between 1937 and 1938. In Moscow alone, between 1937 and 1941, death sentences were carried out against 32,000 people. Only a small portion of them was cremated at Donskoy Crematorium and buried in Grave No. 1 at Donskoy Cemetery. These burials were documented in state security archives. However, other mass burial sites of victims of Moscow’s executions remained unknown for a long time. For many years, the fact that extrajudicial bodies issued death sentences was carefully concealed. Families of the executed were told that their relatives had been sentenced to «10 years without the right to correspondence.» Later, when they inquired again, they received official responses stating: «Died in a labor camp in 1942, 43… from pneumonia, heart failure…» In this way, hundreds of thousands of victims were falsely accounted for as wartime losses.

In 1991, previously unknown archival materials from the Moscow Department of the Ministry of State Security (MGB) were discovered. These included 18 volumes containing orders and reports on the execution of 20,765 people between August 8, 1937, and October 19, 1938. However, even these documents did not specify where exactly these twenty thousand people were executed. Butovo, as a site of mass executions and burials, did not appear in any records, testimonies, or interrogation reports of NKVD officers who were directly or indirectly involved in the executions of the 1930s–1950s. The name Butovo was not spoken publicly—not during the so-called «Khrushchev Thaw,» nor in the years that followed, until the very end of the 1980s.

Until 1995, the territory of the Butovo shooting range was under the jurisdiction of the FSB and was constantly guarded. The shooting range, where the main burial site was located, was enclosed by a solid wooden fence with barbed wire stretched over the top. Along the edges, an NKVD dacha settlement emerged, where, regardless of rank and position, it was only permitted to build small, single-story summer houses—without cellars or massive foundations. Over time, the reasons for this restriction were forgotten, and for the most part, they simply remained unknown. In the early 1970s, the dilapidated fence around the range was renovated, and an apple orchard was planted in the eastern part. The security staff had no idea of the value of the meager fruit garden or the strawberry beds, on the site of which a giant hogweed would later grow.

In August 1997, an archaeological excavation was carried out at Butovo on a small section of land. Qualified specialists participated in the work: archaeologists, a taphologist, a specialist in industrial textiles and footwear, a forensic medical expert, and a firearms expert. A burial trench measuring 12.5 square meters was uncovered. What was revealed to the eyes of the researchers defies description. Piled up, mixed together, as in some kind of livestock burial pit, lay the bodies of murdered people. On the exposed surface of the burial site, the remains of 59 people were discovered, presumably men, aged 25–30, 45–50 years, executed, judging by their clothing, in late autumn or winter. According to experts, the total number of remains in that multi-layered burial was approximately 150 people. Professionals believe that identifying the bodies is possible. But this is a very labor-intensive, lengthy, and costly process. All those murdered at the Butovo shooting range remain unburied to this day. Because this cannot be called a burial…

The details of how the process took place were recounted by an officer of the Public Relations Center of the FSB, formerly the Deputy Head of the Rehabilitation Group, FSB Colonel M. Ye. Kirillin. At that time, in the early 1990s, young FSB employees knew very little about the mass executions. It was a revelation to them, and they did their best to help in any way they could.

«…Prison trucks, which could hold 20-30, and sometimes up to 50 people, arrived at the shooting range from the forest side at approximately 1-2 a.m. At that time, there was no wooden fence. The area was enclosed with barbed wire. Where the prison trucks stopped, there was a guard tower built directly on a tree. Nearby, two buildings could be seen: a small stone house and a long wooden barrack, about eighty meters in length. People were led into the barrack, supposedly for ‘sanitary processing.’ Immediately before the execution, the verdict was announced, and their personal data were verified…

The executions at Butovo were carried out by one of the so-called execution squads, which, according to the acting commandant, consisted of 34 people. One of the local residents, who worked as a driver at the NKVD motor depot, said that the entire special unit consisted of twelve people. This special unit included teams operating in Butovo, Kommunarka, and Moscow—in Varsonofyevsky Lane and Lefortovo Prison.

At first, those executed were buried in small individual graves scattered across the Butovo shooting range. But from August 1937, the scale of executions in Butovo became so massive that the ‘technology’ had to be changed. Using a bulldozer-excavator, several large trenches were dug, approximately 500 meters long, 3 meters wide, and also 3 meters deep (these trenches can be seen in aerial and satellite images taken by land surveying organizations for the state security service; the images clearly show bands indicating altered soil structure in these areas).

The process of roll call, verification with photographs, and sorting out individuals about whom there were any questions probably continued until dawn. As the acting commandant recalled, the executioners remained completely isolated in the stone house nearby during this time. The condemned were led out of the barrack one by one. The executioners then appeared, took their victims, and led each of them deeper into the shooting range toward the trench. They were shot at the edge of the trench, in the back of the head, almost at point-blank range. The bodies of the executed were thrown into the trench, layering the bottom of the deep ditch with them».

In these frames are photographs of those executed in just one day—March 25, 1938. Rarely were fewer than a hundred people shot in a single day. There were days when 300, 400, or even more than 500 people were executed. On February 28, 1938, 562 people were shot.

According to procedure, a doctor and a prosecutor were supposed to be present during the executions, but this requirement was far from always observed. After the execution, documents were filled out, signatures were placed, and then the executioners, usually completely drunk, were taken back to Moscow. Later in the evening, a local resident, whose house had stood on the site of the shooting range until the 1950s, would arrive. He would start a bulldozer and cover the bodies of the executed with a thin layer of soil. The next day, the executions would start all over again. This was a true factory of death.