Butowo-Poligon

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Memorial chapel near Butowo

Butowo is a southern suburb of Moscow . It gained notoriety as a place of execution during the period of the "Great Purge" in the Soviet Union .

NKVD firing range

During the "Great Purge" of 1937 and 1938, over 20,761 people were shot by the NKVD at the Butowski shooting range there . Some days over 500 people lost their lives. Those to be executed were shot to the back of the head and then buried in mass graves on the premises.

The two square kilometers large area originally belonged to the country estate of the Moscow family Zimin. It was handed over to the NKVD in the mid-1930s, which established the firing range there and carried out the first executions in 1935. Responsible for the killings was the so-called Kommandantura of Moscow Oblast under NKVD Major General Vasily Mikhailovich Blochin . In the 1930s, the Sukhanovka , a notorious prison, and the Kommunarka , a special object of the NKVD, were part of the site.

It is unclear whether executions were carried out on the firing range during World War II : There are no documents on this, but shootings cannot be ruled out for this period either. However, the Butovo cemetery continued to be used for burials of prisoners from Moscow prisons. It remained a restricted area until 1995 and was guarded by the KGB and later the FSB .

After the Second World War, a school was located on the site of the firing and firing range, which served the training of police officers and the state security organs of the people 's democracies .

On March 8, 1994, a cross was erected and consecrated on the site. Since 1996 the site has been owned by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church , which has a strong impact on the commemoration of this memorial site. Today it bears the name Butowo-Poligon ( Poligon stands for (military) training ground in Russian ).

literature

  • Alexander Vatlin : The Butovo Firing Range - Place of Remembrance of the Great Terror of 1937/38 . In: Andreas Wirsching , Jürgen Zarusky , Alexander Tschubarjan, Viktor Ischtschenko (eds.): Remembrance of dictatorship and war. Focal points of cultural memory between Russia and Germany since 1945 (sources and representations on contemporary history 107), De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, Boston, Mass. 2015, pp. 249-257, ISBN 978-3-11-040476-0 .
  • Margarete Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an actor in the politics of memory (1995–2009). The Butovo shooting range as a case study for post-Soviet commemorative culture , in: Jörg Ganzenmüller , Raphael Utz: Soviet crimes and Russian memory. Places - Actors - Interpretations ( Europe's East in the 20th Century. Writings of the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena , 4), de Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 59–90.
  • Arseni Borissowitsch Roginski , Larissa Semjonowna Eromina; Расстрельные списки. Москва 1937-1941. "Коммунарка", Бутово. Memorial, Moscow 2000.

Web links

Commons : Butovo firing range  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Project commemorative sample : Butovo ( Memento of the original dated December 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved May 5, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gedenkmuster.uni-jena.de
  2. ↑ Project commemorative sample: The New Cemetery ( Memento of the original from December 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved May 5, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gedenkmuster.uni-jena.de
  3. ↑ Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an actor in the politics of memory , p. 59.
  4. ↑ Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an actor in the politics of memory , p. 60.
  5. ↑ Vatlin: The Butovo Firing Range - Place of Remembrance of the Great Terror 1937/38 , p. 255.
  6. ↑ Zimmermann: The Russian Orthodox Church as an actor in the politics of memory , p. 62.
  7. ↑ See the contributions by Alexander Vatlin and Margarete Zimmermann.

Coordinates: 55 ° 32 '  N , 37 ° 36'  E