Butovo Firing Range

Underfoot, the ground is soft and uneven. Long, low ridges of grass run between the birch trees, like furrows in a field that was never planted. Birdsong carries clearly here, and the traffic of the outer suburbs feels far away. Before you know anything about this place, you may notice how quiet it is, and how carefully people walk.

This is the Butovo firing range, on the edge of the village of Drozhzhino, just beyond the southern edge of Moscow. Today it is a memorial and a place of prayer. But during the late 1930s, it was one of the main execution and burial sites of the Soviet secret police. The grass ridges around you are not natural. They mark mass graves.

The land did not begin as a place of death. Before the revolution of 1917, this was a country estate, with a manor house, outbuildings and parkland. In its final years before the revolution, it belonged to the Zimin family, well-known Moscow merchants. After the revolution, the estate was taken by the state. In the 1930s it came under the control of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police of that era.

At first, the grounds were used as a shooting range for training, which is how the name firing range came about. Then, in August 1937, the purpose changed. This was the start of what historians call the Great Terror, a period of mass arrests and executions ordered from the top of the Soviet state. Moscow needed somewhere outside the city to carry out killings in secret. Butovo became one of those places.

The numbers are hard to hold in the mind. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than twenty thousand people were shot here and buried on this ground. Records released in the 1990s list over 20,700 names for that period alone. On some days, hundreds of people were killed. Most were brought from Moscow prisons by night, and buried in long trenches dug by machinery.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. The people buried here were mostly not politicians or officials. They were ordinary workers, peasants, office clerks, students, pensioners and housewives. They came from dozens of nationalities, and many were arrested simply because of their background, their faith, or a denunciation by a neighbour. The archive lists show the full range of Soviet society in those two years.

Among them were close to a thousand Orthodox clergy and lay believers. One of the best known is Metropolitan Seraphim Chichagov, a senior bishop who had been a military officer before taking holy orders. He was elderly and very ill when he was arrested in 1937, and he was shot here that December. The Russian Orthodox Church later recognised him and hundreds of others killed at Butovo as saints.

For decades after the killings, the site stayed closed. It remained a guarded area under the security services, and almost no one outside knew what lay under the trees. Some local residents remembered hearing shots at night in the 1930s, but they did not speak about it openly. Only at the start of the 1990s, as Soviet archives opened, did the truth about Butovo become public.

In the 1990s, the site was handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church. Relatives of the victims, historians and volunteers began to gather the names and stories of the dead. In 1997, a small part of one trench was carefully opened. Researchers found that the remains lay in several layers, one above another. The opening was then closed again, and the ground was left undisturbed.

As you walk, look at the buildings that now stand near the graves. First came a small wooden church, built in the mid-1990s in a simple northern Russian style. Later, a large white stone church was added, dedicated to the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the believers killed during the Soviet period. Its bright walls and domes stand out sharply against the dark green of the woods.

Near the graves, you may also see a tall wooden cross. It was made on the Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea in the far north, where one of the first Soviet prison camps was set up. The cross was brought here as a link between two places of suffering. Its carved wood has weathered to a soft grey, and people often leave flowers at its base.

The names matter most here. Along the edge of the burial area, long stone walls carry the names of the people shot at Butovo, row after row, with their ages and the dates of their deaths. Visitors often search for a family name, then stand silently in front of it. Some touch the letters. If you read a few lines, you will see teenagers listed beside people in their seventies.

This is not a museum in the usual sense. It is a cemetery, and many visitors come here to grieve. Services take place in the churches, and each year relatives and believers gather here to read the names of the dead aloud. The reading takes many hours. Walk quietly, keep to the paths, and let the mood of the place guide your behaviour.

Before you leave, look once more at the grass ridges between the trees. The birches have grown tall since the 1930s, and the light falls through them in soft patches. Children from the nearby village sometimes pass on the road outside. Life continues around this ground, as it should. But now you know what the quiet means... and you can carry a few of those names with you as you walk back to the gate.