Butovo firing range
Coordinates: 55°32′00″N 37°35′39″E / 55.53333°N 37.59417°E
The Butovo Firing Range or Butovo Shooting Range (Russian: Бутовский полигон) is a former private estate near the village of Drozhzhino (Russian: Дрожжино) in the Yuzhnoye Butovo District south of Moscow that was seized by the Soviets after the 1917 revolution and thereafter used by their secret police as an agricultural colony, shooting range, and from 1938 to 1953 as a site for executions and mass graves of persons deemed "enemies of the people." During Josef Stalin's Great Terror from 1937 to 1938, more than 20,000 political prisoners were transported to the site and executed by gunshot. Victims included Béla Kun, Gustav Klutsis, Seraphim Chichagov, and a number of Orthodox priests later canonized as the New Martyrs. The Russian Orthodox Church took over the ownership of the lot in 1995 and had a large Russian Revival memorial church erected there. The mass grave may be visited on weekends.
Until the 19th century, the site was occupied by a small settlement by the name of Kosmodemyanskoye Drozhino, first attested in 1568 as owned by a local boyar Fyodor Drozhin. The estate's owner in 1889 was N.M. Solovov, who turned it into a large stud farm and had a large hippodrome built there. His descendant, I.I. Zimin, wisely donated the stud farm to the state in the aftermath of the October Revolution in exchange for the right to flee the country. The farm then became the property of the Red Army.
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