TheKommunarka Shooting Site often mistakenly calledKommunarka firing range (Russian:Расстрельный полигон «Коммунарка»), formerdacha of secret police chiefGenrikh Yagoda, was used as an execution site andmass grave from 1937 to 1941. Executions may have been carried out there by theNKVD during theGreat Terror and until the war started; alternatively, bodies of those shot elsewhere might have been brought there for later interment.[1] As Russian historianArseny Roginsky explained: "firing range" was a popular euphemism adopted to describe mysterious and closely-guarded plots of land that the NKVD began to set aside for mass burials on the eve of theGreat Terror.[2]
Talking toIzvestiya in 2007 a representative of theFederal Security Service suggested that approximately 10,000 people had been killed and buried inmass graves at Kommunarka.[3] Painstaking work byMemorial researchers and others in the 1990s established the identity of 4,527 known to be buried there. Their names were published in Memorial's first Book of Remembrance.[4] Before Kommunarka opened as a memorial complex in 2018 an archaeological survey indicated that 6,600 bodies probably lay there, the total number of names since reached through further documentary research.[1]
As with so many other "firing ranges" throughout the former Soviet Union, theFSB (successor to theKGB and theNKVD) retained control of the territory for many decades thereafter. Only in 1999, was the land transferred, as with theButovo firing range south of Moscow, to theRussian Orthodox Church. Only on 14 November 1999 did a plaque commemorating the Victims of Political Repression at the "special installation" finally appear, later than at any other mass burial site in Moscow, commentsArseny Roginsky.[2] A church dedicated to Russia'sNew Martyrs and Confessors, i.e. those who had died for their Christian faith during the Soviet period, was built at Kommunarka and their feast day was thereafter celebrated each year on or around 25 January.
On 27 October 2018 when the memorial site opened all 6,609 names of those known to be buried there were included on the Wall of Remembrance. A controversy then arose over the inclusion on the lists of some 50 high-ranking secret police officers (including Yagoda himself) none of whom had been rehabilitated.[5]
The decision to use a single list was explained byMemorial (society) chairman Jan Raczynski, one of those who had taken part in discussions of the form the memorial complex should take: other partners in the project were the Gulag Museum, representatives of the buried victims, the Moscow city commission for the Victims of Political Repression and theRussian Orthodox Church. The committee concluded, said Raczynski, that everyone deserved a grave to which relatives and descendants might come. This included all those who had been buried at Kommunarka but in no sense did it exonerate them of any earlier crimes.[6]
Leading Bolsheviks convicted at the two laterMoscow Show Trials were among the many prominent Party leaders buried at Kommunarka, particularly those publicly tried convicted at the so-calledTrial of the Twenty-One in March 1938. Some defendants from the January 1937 Trial of the Seventeen likeBeloborodov andBubnov who were charged but did not appear in court were also buried at Kommunarka.[9] Most of the other defendants in the Trial of the Twenty One are buried here: Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Rosengolts, Vladimir Ivanov, Mikhail Chernov, and Isaak Zelensky; Uzbek leaders Akmal Ikramov and Faizulla Khodjaev; Vasily Sharangovich, Prokopy Zubarev, and NKVD officerPavel Bulanov; Kremlin doctorsLev Levin and Ignaty Kazakov; Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky andPyotr Kryuchkov, Maxim Gorky's secretary. Among burials are Mongolian revolutionariesBadrakh,Dogsom,Losol,Luvsanshara andShijee, the writers Pilnyak, Kirshon, Jasienski, Red Army and NKVD officers Agranov, the Berman brothers, Berzin, Kogan, Pauker, and also two Central Europeans:Bela Kun, who headed the short-lived 1919 Soviet republic in Hungary, and ex-priestTheodore Maly, who recruited Soviet agents abroad and in the mid-1930s.[10]
Media related toKommunarka shooting site at Wikimedia Commons55°34′45″N37°27′21″E / 55.57917°N 37.45583°E /55.57917; 37.45583