Butovo Shooting Range is one of the largest sites of mass executions during the Great Terror. From August 1937 to October 1938, more than 20,000 people were executed here. The operations were carried out secretly, at night, based on pre-approved lists. People were brought in prisoner transport trucks under the pretext of being transferred to another camp. They were led into a wooden barrack, their names were called, documents checked, belts and shoes removed. Then, one by one, they were taken into the forest, where the sentence was carried out with a shot to the back of the head. The bodies were thrown into pre-dug trenches. On peak days, 300–500 people were executed per night. On February 28, 1938, 562 people were shot.
The victims included peasants, workers, engineers, doctors, writers, artists, clergy, Red Army officers, former Tsarist military personnel, and Communist Party officials. They were convicted by an NKVD troika, which ruled without trial or lawyers. Families of the executed were informed that their relatives had been sentenced to «10 years without the right to correspondence.» Years later, they received official notices stating that their loved ones had «died in the camp from pneumonia» or «heart failure.»
Until 1995, the site remained under FSB protection. No official records of the executions existed. In 1991, 18 volumes of execution orders and reports for 20,765 people were discovered in the Moscow KGB archive, but they did not specify the execution site. In 1997, archaeological excavations began on the site. In the mass graves, researchers found the remains of hundreds of people, buried in multiple layers.
Today, Butovo Shooting Range is a memorial complex and one of the few places dedicated to the memory of Stalinist repressions. Thousands of those executed remain unnamed, and their remains have never been properly buried. Butovo is a symbol of a tragedy that was silenced for decades.
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