The Butovo Firing Range

The Butovo polygon on the southern edge of Moscow, the NKVD shooting ground where, over the fourteen months from August 1937 to October 1938, 20,761 people were shot and buried in mass graves — among them several hundred put to death on church-related charges, of whom more than three hundred have been glorified as New Martyrs. Called the “Russian Golgotha,” Butovo, with its memorial church and its annual patriarchal service, has become the central pilgrimage site of the New Martyrs and the emblem of the Great Terror’s assault on the Church.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Polygon

The Butovo firing range (Butovskii poligon) lay on a former estate on the southern outskirts of Moscow, requisitioned by the NKVD and turned, during the Great Terror, into one of the principal execution and burial grounds for the Moscow region. Here the condemned of the Moscow “mass operations” were brought by night from the city prisons, shot at the edge of long pits dug by excavator, and buried where they fell. The killing at Butovo was concentrated in an appallingly short span: the mass executions ran from 8 August 1937 to 19 October 1938, and in those roughly fourteen months 20,761 people were shot and buried at Butovo — a figure established from the NKVD’s own execution records, opened in the 1990s (Butovo memorial documentation, drawing on the NKVD execution registers; the figure of 20,761 is the standard documented total, reported in the memorial’s records and in the general scholarship of the site; see also The Terror of the 1930s). The victims were of every class and nationality caught in the Terror — workers, peasants, officials, foreigners, “former people” — and among them was a substantial body of the persecuted Church.

The New Martyrs of Butovo

Of the more than twenty thousand shot at Butovo, several hundred were put to death on charges connected to the Church, and it is the single largest identifiable concentration of glorified New Martyrs in one place. By the tabulation of the Butovo research, on the order of 940 people were executed at Butovo on church-related charges — including some seven bishops, around fifteen archimandrites, and roughly six hundred priests and deacons, together with monastics and lay believers — and of these, more than 300 (about 332) have been glorified among the Sobor of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia (figures from the Butovo memorial and the New Martyrs of Butovo documentation; the “about 332 glorified” and the breakdown by rank are reported in the memorial’s own accounts and the survey literature on the site). Among the New Martyrs shot at Butovo was Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov), the elderly former hierarch, historian, and composer, executed there in 1937 — one of the best-known of the Butovo martyrs. The great majority of the Butovo New Martyrs, however, are ordinary parish clergy and laypeople whose names survive precisely because the Butovo execution registers were preserved (see The Priest and Lay Martyrs).

It is because of this concentration that Butovo is called the “Russian Golgotha” (Russkaia Golgofa) — a place where the blood of so many of the Church’s martyrs was shed on one small patch of ground that it has become, for the Russian Church, a Calvary of the twentieth century (the “Russian Golgotha” designation is the standard epithet for Butovo in the Church’s usage).

The Memorial Church and the Pilgrimage

After the site was identified and the archives opened in the 1990s, Butovo was transformed from a hidden mass grave into the principal shrine of the New Martyrs. A wooden memorial church was built at the site in 1995–96, and subsequently a large stone Church of the Resurrection and of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia was raised at Butovo and consecrated in 2007 — its consecration falling in the same year as the reconciliation between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad, a coincidence given deliberate symbolic weight, since the New Martyrs (glorified by both bodies) were invoked as the shared heritage that made the reunion possible (on the Butovo memorial churches and the 2007 significance; the OrthoChristian and Moscow Times coverage of Butovo as a memorial site). Since 2000, the Patriarch of Moscow has led an annual open-air Divine Liturgy at Butovo on the fourth Saturday of Pascha, dedicated to the New Martyrs shot there — the great gathering that makes Butovo the central pilgrimage of the New Martyr cult (on the annual patriarchal service at Butovo, the memorial’s records and press coverage; see The Feast and the Cult).

Butovo also holds together, in one place, the two truths this collection keeps in tension. It is a memorial to the whole of Stalin’s terror — the 20,761 shot there were overwhelmingly not clergy, and the site commemorates all of them, its “Garden of Memory” listing every name — and it is at the same time the shrine of the New Martyrs specifically, the several hundred killed for the faith. The site’s own presentation honours both: it is a place of general national mourning for the victims of the Terror and a place of ecclesial veneration for the martyrs, and it does not collapse the one into the other (on Butovo as both a general memorial and a specifically ecclesial shrine, and the tension held there, see Memory and Controversy). This is the same discipline this collection applies to the numbers: the executed and the canonized are different quantities, and Butovo, where both are named on the same ground, is the physical illustration of the difference (see The Scale of the Persecution).

What Butovo Establishes

Butovo is, evidentially, the firmest ground in the whole story of the New Martyrs, because here the documentary and the physical evidence converge. The execution registers give the names, dates, and charges; the mass graves give the bodies; and the two together allow the martyrdom to be established with a certainty rare in the persecution. Where much of the New Martyrs’ story rests on fragmentary files and later testimony, Butovo rests on the killers’ own precise records of whom they shot and when (on the paradox of the NKVD records as the primary source, see The Documentary Record). It is a grim kind of certainty — the certainty of the executioner’s ledger — but it is certainty, and it is why Butovo, more than any other site, allows the Church to name its martyrs and the historian to count its dead.

See Also

• The Solovki Camp — the other emblematic site, a camp rather than a killing ground
• The Terror of the 1930s — the wave that filled Butovo
• The Priest and Lay Martyrs — the ordinary clergy who form the bulk of the Butovo New Martyrs
• The Documentary Record — the execution registers behind the Butovo names
• The Feast and the Cult — the Butovo pilgrimage and the annual patriarchal service

References

• Butovo memorial documentation and the “New Martyrs of Butovo” records, drawing on the NKVD execution registers opened in the 1990s. (The total of 20,761 shot 8 Aug 1937–19 Oct 1938; the ~940 executed on church charges and the ~332 glorified; the breakdown by rank; used to locate the figures.) See OrthodoxWiki, “New Martyrs of Butovo,” and the OrthoChristian and Moscow Times reporting on the Butovo memorial site.
• Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The Moscow mass operations of 1937–38.)
• On the memorial Church of the Resurrection and New Martyrs at Butovo (consecrated 2007) and the annual patriarchal Liturgy: OrthoChristian.Com reporting on the Butovo memorial site.