http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/world/europe/08butovo.html?

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Former Killing Ground Becomes Shrine to Stalins

Victims

James Hill for The New York Times

In Butovo, just outside Moscow, more than 20,000 people were shot to death and buried during the Stalinist terror of the
1930s. In May, visitors to the shrine there looked at secret police photos of victims, including many Russian Orthodox
priests, who were executed as enemies of the people.
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Published: June 8, 2007

BUTOVO, Russia Barbed wire still lines the perimeter of the secret police compound
here on the southern edge of Moscow where more, perhaps far more, than 20,000
people were shot and buried from August 1937 through October 1938, at the height of
Stalins purges.

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James Hill for The New York Times

Visitors to the former killing ground, originally a military firing range, looked at the long row of monuments inscribed with
names of the dead.

The New York Times

Now, gradually, Butovsky poligon literally, the Butovo shooting range is becoming
a shrine to all of the victims of Stalins murderous campaigns. Grass-covered mounds
holding the victims bones crisscross the pastoral field, which is now dotted with
flowers and birch trees.
Searing portraits from victims case files found in the archives of the secret police are
displayed, along with a grim month-by-month chart of executions, in front of a small
wooden church in the field.
This place is our Russian Golgotha, said Andrei Kuznetsov, 34, a social worker,
making the sign of the cross recently in front of a newly built white stone church near
the site, the Church of the Resurrection and the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of
Russia. There is Golgotha in the Holy Land, where our Lord Jesus Christ suffered for
our sins. All of Russia was Golgotha in the 20th century.

The killing ground is a symbol of a much larger, bloodier conflict in Russian society,
that between the Bolsheviks and the Russian Orthodox Church. One thousand of those
killed here are known to have died for their Orthodox faith. More than 320 have been
canonized as new martyrs of the church bishops, monks, nuns and lay people who
were victims of Soviet rule.
The new church was consecrated on May 19 as part of the celebration of the reunion of
the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Church Abroad, an migr group that
broke away in the 1920s. The walls of the church are filled with icons of the new
martyrs, including one depicting their executioners shooting them. Glass cases in the
lower church are filled with their personal items, like an executed priests prayer book
and his violin.
The names of the victims are engraved on plaques lining one of the fences around the
field. The fence overlooks dachas that were built in a parklike setting for officials of the
K.G.B., the secret police agency was a successor of the Stalin-era N.K.V.D. and endured
until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
They say the strawberries grew especially large at these dachas, said Galina Pryakina,
70, nodding at the mounds of bones as she traced her finger across the plaques and
found the name of a monk, now a saint, killed on the same day as her father, June 4,
1938.
She visited the site this year on the fourth Saturday after Easter, a day that Patriarch
Aleksy II of the Russian Orthodox Church has chosen in recent years to commemorate
Butovos martyrs. I spent 66 years looking for him, Ms. Pryakina said of her father.
She was an infant when he was arrested, supposedly as a Romanian spy, and she and
her mother were sent into exile.
Three years ago, she journeyed to Moscow from her home in southern Kazakhstan to
find her fathers burial place. She headed for a cemetery in the citys north, but a
woman at a bus stop Ms. Pryakina is convinced that it was a vision of the Virgin
Mary directed her to Butovo. Within minutes, her fathers name was tracked in a
database here.
The Rev. Kirill Kaleda, rector of the Church of the Resurrection and the Holy New
Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, has a tragically intimate connection to the parish.
His grandfather Vladimir Ambartsumov, who was a priest, is one of the new martyrs.
He was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to 10 years without the right of

correspondence, the official euphemism for a death sentence. The Kaleda family spent
decades searching for him.
I remember very well how when we were little, after our morning and evening prayers,
we would add a prayer asking to find how our Grandpa Volodya died, Father Kaleda
said. It seemed that hope of learning the circumstances of Grandfathers death had
almost vanished. We had thought he died somewhere in the camps.
Mikhail Mindlin, a concentration camp survivor who devoted his retirement in the
1980s and 1990s to systematically studying Soviet repression, fought to have the
existence of the Butovo killing ground recognized by the state. Eventually, thanks to
sympathetic K.G.B. officials, files with the names of those executed on the orders of
Stalins henchman Nikolai I. Yezhov were found in secret police files.
The scope of the killings is staggering. Butovos victims ranged from peasants and
factory workers to czarist generals, Russian Orthodox hierarchs, German Communists,
Latvian writers, invalids and even Moscows Chinese launderers, dozens of whom were
executed as enemies of the people.
Ultimately many Soviet officials, including Yezhov and other N.K.V.D. officials who
carried out the purges, were gunned down at Butovo and elsewhere as the revolution
consumed its creators.
Some objections have been raised to the Russian Orthodox focus of the memorial,
given the wide variety of victims buried here. But Arseny Roginsky, the chairman of
Memorial, an organization that works to catalog Soviet crimes and help victims of
repression, said the church had stepped into a void left by the state.
Its a bit strange that this is a purely Orthodox place, but nothing tragic, he said. I
dont really like this. I think this should be a multicultural place.
But its better that there be something than nothing. If the state is not ready to
understand the meaning of terror in its history, the role and place of terror in its
history, its not so terrible that the Orthodox Church took it upon itself.