In parallel to the discovery of the ‘Registers of Executions’, archaeologists began to investigate the sites with the aim of providing definitive proof. Archaeologists, specialists in electro-magnetic measurements and ground-penetrating radar (GPR), experts on industrial textiles and shoes, specialists in forensic medicine, anthropologists and ballistics experts all began to excavate the site in August 1997. They soon discovered, buried at a depth of 1.5 metres, vestiges of clothes, leather jackets, leather and felt boots, gloves that had been removed and thrown into the trenches, splinters of glass bottles, and also human remains. The first excavation trench yielded up three layers of human bodies and also, as a drawing by the archaeologists shows, bodies that had melted into one another in the course of the passing decades – bodies of religious believers and atheists, simple peasants and workers, university graduates and Party officials, Soviet citizens and foreigners, Russians and non-Russians. Some of the dead had bullet holes at the back of their heads made by 7 to 8 mm calibre bullets and also exit holes in the front of their skulls. There is evidence that some victims were buried while still alive. Even today, when a church and a memorial have been built on the site, the excavations have not yet come to an end. The Orthodox Church holds annual memorial services for the priests and the faithful who were murdered in Butovo and throughout Russia and, together with Moscow city government, has transformed the Butovskii poligon into a memorial. The Church of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the buildings and the park of the former estate of Drozhzhino-Butovo, the village cemetery and the village ponds all form part of the grounds.
The area between the major roads leading south from the city was one Moscow place of execution among others: it occupies around 3 square kilometres and lies between Varshavskoe, Simferopol'skoe and Rastorguevskoe highways. In the days of the mass operations it was surrounded by fences, watchtowers and barriers.8 To the west of Butovo lay Sovkhoz Kommunarka, a property belonging to the NKVD, where the bodies of 6,500 executed people had been buried by 1 October 1941. It had been supposed initially that the mass grave contained 10,000 to 14,000 victims. Kommunarka, like the Sukhanovka prison, was intended for prominent prisoners and people condemned to death. Some 200 inhabitants of Government House are buried there, and this even includes the likes of Nikolai Bukharin and Iosif Unshlikht, who once lived in the Kremlin. The mass graves of Kommunarka contain the remains of legendary Red Army commanders, naval commanders and leading spies, such as Sergei Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband. Initially it was mainly former members of the Cheka who were shot and buried there, people such as Yakov Peters and Martyn Latsis. The grounds of Kommunarka contain the remains of writers such as Boris Pilniak and Artem Veselyi and the authors and staff members of over fifty publishing houses and newspapers. There are few members of the clergy but a striking number of railway workers. There was one further period during which Kommunarka would be the site of mass executions. This was after the onset of the German invasion of the Soviet Union – on 27, 28 and 30 July 1941. The victims on that occasion included the wives of the military leaders Kork, Uborevich, Tukhachevskii and Gamarnik.
Early in 1939 the secret Sukhanovka prison was built in the neighbourhood of Butovskii poligon, within the walls of the former St Catherine Monastery. One of the first inmates of this so-called torture dacha was Yezhov himself, who spent nine months here, and who was transported from here to hearings at the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR, which finally sentenced him to death. Another inmate of the Sukhanovka was Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife; here too the long-standing head of the Moscow NKVD, Stanislav Redens, was imprisoned, and Isaac Babel was shot. The prison, which was designed to hold 150 prisoners, was intended for members of the Party elite, Comintern leaders, foreigners, diplomats and members of the Cheka. After Butyrka, Lubianka and Lefortovo, Sukhanovka was regarded as the nadir of human cruelty.
With the outbreak of war, the so-called special facilities on the outskirts of the city were shut down or evacuated. This included Sukhanovka, which, however, was reopened in 1942 and became the prison of choice for military commanders who had escaped from the underground behind the front or had fled from German captivity.9
Butovo was just one point in a network devoted to selection, arrest, incarceration, deportation and killing. The history of this machinery, with its gates, corridors, offices, cells, inner prisons and isolation cells, its interrogation chambers and execution cellars, as well as restrooms for the warders, thugs and torture specialists, has still to be written. It would be the history of a city within a city, a gated community of security specialists and murder experts with their own rules, passes and insignia, a city with special shops, kindergartens, schools, and clubs for leisure time and culture, and with an agricultural distribution network, dachas and sanatoria in the vicinity.
The complex had grown over the years. In a town where the state of emergency had remained in force ever since the Revolution, there was a constant need for ‘special facilities’ and ‘special-purpose buildings’.
Figures 33.2 to 33.5 The pictures show (from left to right) the the passage and courtyards of the prison in Moscow, Dzerzhinskii ploshchad' 2, through which the prisoners were taken into the Lubianka; the building of the OGPU/NKVD in Varsonof'evskii pereulok 5–7, with the so-called shooting garage towards the rear; the Taganskaia prison, in which the major proportion of those condemned to death by shooting were housed; and a corridor in the Butyrka prison.
‘Butovo was just one point in a network devoted to selection, arrest, incarceration, deportation and killing.’
During the Civil War, officers, members of the nobility, clergy, and other ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ were executed in the Kremlin, the parks, on Khodynka Field and in the Khamovniki Barracks. Further places of execution during the Civil War included the Moscow monasteries: Spaso Andron'evskii, Ivanovskii and Novospasskii.
In time a regular ‘labyrinth of terror’ came into being in the city centre, spreading out its tentacles in every direction and occupying houses and whole streets: the empire of the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage’ (Cheka) and its successor organization the GPU. This included buildings in Bolshaia, Rozhdestvenka and Malaia Lubianka streets, on Kuznetskii most, and in Varsonofievskii, Khol'zunova and the Bol'shoi and Maly' Kiselnyi lanes. These buildings, which belonged first to the Cheka and then the GPU, contained not only prisons, but also execution chambers and rooms for disposing of the bodies. Varsonof'evskii pereulok 7–9 was also the home of car pool no. 1 – in other words, the garages of the secret police. Here, in the cellars, six chambers were equipped for shooting people and to serve as a morgue. As early as 1918 Muscovites called this place the ‘shooting garage’ (garazh rasstrelov).
Bolshaia Lubianka 9 contained the barracks of the Cheka units, while Bolshaia Lubianka 11 was also home to the Cheka, with its own gaol. Muscovites called this building the ‘Ship of Death’ (korabl' smerti). Bol'shaia Lubianka 14 and 18 housed the Moscow Cheka and the Revolutionary Tribunal. The corner house in Maly' Kisel'nyi pereulok contained housing for the Moscow Cheka, while Special Services (spetssluzhby) were located on the corner of Bol'shaia Lubianka and Varsonof'evskii pereulok, a fact that was not revealed until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Further centres were the prison complexes in Sretenka Street, and the Butyrka, Lefortovo and Taganskaia prisons.
During the decade following the Revolution and leading up to the Great Terror, the victims’ bodies were buried mainly in places within the city precincts. Between 1926 and 1936 this was chiefly in Vagan'kov cemetery, but also in the grounds of Yauza hospital in Verkhniaia-Radishchevskaia Street in the Taganskii District. Between 1935 and 1953 burials and to some extent also cremations were carried out in the Donskoe cemetery, where Moscow’s new crematorium had been built.10 It has been said that dogs scavenging in the Kalitinovskoe cemetery in Malaia Kalitinovskaia Street, close to the Moscow Mea
t Combine, were often seen loping around with body parts in their jaws.11
This situation changed with the onset of the ‘mass operations’ of 1937. ‘The department concerned with looking after Moscow’s cemeteries was unable to cope with the flood of burials. It was presumably at around this time that the idea of setting up special facilities close to Moscow was mooted.’ At the time, three places were deemed suitable: first, Butovskii poligon, 18 kilometres outside the city, on the Staro-Varshavskaya Highway; second, Iagoda’s former dacha on the Kommunarka state farm, 24 kilometres out on the Staro-Kaluzhskaia Highway; and, finally, as a reserve cemetery somewhat further distant, the sewage farms of Liubertsy to the south-east of Moscow. There were presumably even more mass burial sites elsewhere. One such may have been Avel' Enukidze’s former dacha in Meshcherino, an estate that had once belonged to the Russian landscape painter Nikolai Meshcherin and that was situated a few kilometres from the Gorky Leninskie Museum and Memorial. Other places to be mentioned include Teryayevsky Forest in the grounds of the Kommunarka state farm, the mass graves of the officers shot in the period 1939–41 in Shcherbinka, and an unknown grave in the NKVD camp in Ostaf'evskoie. Neighbours also refer to the dacha in the village of Verkhnee Otradnoe, which used to belong to Artuzov (a.k.a. Fraucci), a Cheka operative of Swiss origin.13 Investigations have led to the discovery of 26,098 dead in graves in Moscow, the majority of whom – 19,799 – were in Butovo and Kommunarka (see table 33.3).
Table 33.3 Numbers of dead from the ‘Great Terror’ discovered in graves in Moscow
Butovo shooting range 8 August 1937 – 19 October 1938 15,036
Kommunarka Butovo 1937–41 4,763
Donskoe cemetery 1930–52 5,068
Grounds of Iauza hospital 1926–36 106
Vagan’kov cemetery 1926–36 1,007
Unknown burial location 11812
Mass murder on the outskirts of the city
The majority of the death sentences carried out in Butovo were handed down by non-judicial organs: by three-man commissions (troiki), two-man commissions (dvoiki) or the military tribunal of the Supreme Court. At the beginning of the mass operations in August 1937, there were three three-man commissions in Moscow: the central commission presided over by Leonid Zakovskii, Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD; the Moscow commission presided over by Stanislav Redens, chairman of the Moscow NKVD, and, following the latter’s arrest, by G. Jakubovich; and the commission of the militia under the chairmanship of M. Semenov, which was responsible above all for all ‘dangerous social elements’ – tramps, beggars, thieves, petty criminals, and people guilty of passport offences – some of whom had been sentenced under Article 58 –‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’.
The second non-judicial organ was the two-man commission, the so-called dvoika, representing the NKVD and the state prosecutor of the USSR, which consisted of Nikolai Yezhov and the public prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii, whose task was to confirm the sentences handed down by the provincial troikas.
The dead lying in the mass graves of Kommunarka – well-known Party officials – had been condemned to death by firing squad by the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
At the beginning of the so-called mass operations, a quota of 35,000 had been set for Moscow and the Moscow region. Of these, 5,000 were in the first category, ‘supreme penalty’ – i.e. capital punishment – and 30,000 in the second category – i.e. imprisonment in a camp. This represented a reduction in the numbers originally demanded by Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Party, who had called for 8,500 people to be shot and 32,905 accused to be sentenced to camp imprisonment.14 People were not arrested on the basis of concrete evidence but because they fitted a certain ‘perpetrator profile’. The deliberations of the troikas took place in the absence of those who were arrested and accused. Judgement was handed down not because a charge had been proven but as a result of confessions that had been produced with the aid of every conceivable method, including torture.15 The victims were chosen on the basis of records that had been assembled over a period of years – in the personnel sections of companies, apartment block administrations, and tenants’ lists. Looking back on those years, A. Postel, a former operative in the NKVD, said: ‘They arrested and shot entire families, including totally illiterate women, minors and even pregnant women, all of whom were shot . . . simply because of their nationality.’16 The interrogations were conducted according to the ‘album’ method which made assembly-line judgements possible.
At the end of the investigation the local NKVD employees submitted a report, a so-called spravka, with suggestions for an appropriate sentence (shooting or five to ten years in a camp). These reports were incorporated into a special list (the album) and corrected by the head of the UNKVD as well as the local public prosecutor (to bring the decisions into line with the recommended punishment) and then signed. The album was then sent on to Moscow, where the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and the directors of public prosecutions of the USSR (Yezhov and Vyshinskii) made the final decisions. The sentences were carried out when the album was returned to the UNKVD.17 There was a regular competition to see who could deal with the most cases and at greater speed. I. Berg, who was responsible for the implementation of the death sentences in Butovo, has described the process.
All criminal cases (dela) were simply passed on by Semenov without comment, 400 to 450 trials in the troika, i.e. two trials every minute. It has to be said that Semyonov competed with Jakubovich to see who was the faster . . . After a sitting, Semenov always went over to Jakubovich’s room and boasted that he had dispatched fifty cases more than him in the same time, and they were both delighted to have been able to pass sentence so quickly without even having glanced at the dossiers.18
Those sentenced in this way were taken to the gaols in Moscow, where they were photographed from the side and from the front. The files were brought up to date and sent on to Butovo. The road to Butovo began for the condemned men and women with the signature of the Moscow NKVD commissar Stanislav Redens. M. Semenov and I. Berg were in charge of organization and logistics – transport from the gaols, execution and disposal of the bodies. They not only confirmed that the sentences had been carried out with their signatures but also took part in the executions.19
Higher ranking officers of the NKVD frequently visited Butovo as well, among them the future general Vasilii Blokhin. Blokhin was one of the few to survive the purges of the NKVD and to die in his bed. Evidently no massacre took place at that time without his involvement – his name constantly recurs in the documentation: Katyn, Kharkov and Mednoe, near Tver', where 15,000 Polish officers were killed alongside Soviet citizens. Blokhin was described by his colleagues and fellow students – he studied architecture in his later years – as cheerful and comradely, yet he personally took part in the executions although he was not obliged to do so. For his work he would dress, so we are told, like a butcher, with a brown rubber apron, overalls and rubber boots.20
People living close by seem to have taken no notice of the shootings at first. ‘A shooting range is a shooting range’ (poligon est' poligon). But there were rumours; people heard things and glimpsed them; there were suspicious comings and goings. People saw ‘Black Marias’ (avtozaki) transporting prisoners. Sometimes, they came in twos and threes, sometimes there were ten at a time. People heard screams in the woods. No one knew anything for certain, but something was definitely going on. The surrounding population referred to the vans as dushegubki; the rumour was that gas was fed into them. After his arrest in 1938, I. Berg, the former head of the administration of the Moscow NKVD, was accused of having invented the dushegubki – i.e. the gas trucks – and he was sentenced for that.21
In the early 1990s, A. Sadovskii, the former commandant of the Economic Division of the Moscow NKVD, who served in Butovo from January to October 1937, gave an account of the mass executions there.
People who were condemned to be shot were brought to Butovo wi
thout being told why and what for. Matters were intentionally arranged in that way so as to avoid unnecessary complications. The avtozaki, which could transport up to fifty people, drove to the shooting range from the side of the forest at around 1 or 2 a.m. The wooden fence did not exist at that time. The area was enclosed by barbed wire. Where the vans came to a stop there was some higher ground for the watch and the searchlights mounted on the trees. Two buildings could be seen quite close by: a not very large stone house and very long wooden hut about 80 metres long. The people were taken to the hut for the sanobrabotka, the showers. They were informed about their sentence immediately before they were shot, and their particulars were confirmed. This was done with great care. Together with the files relevant to the actual execution, there were also documents providing very precise information on the names and dates of birth of the condemned.
And given the rate at which the investigations were carried out at the time, we need not be surprised to hear that it was not unknown in Butovo for a man to be executed by mistake instead of his brother. An execution could be postponed if a photograph was mislaid, without which the identity of a condemned man could not be established. In all such cases, the execution was postponed and the condemned were returned to their cells. This punctiliousness in the place of execution sometimes worked in favour of the prisoner, but in reality the postponement of an execution was an extremely rare event. Normally, the person concerned would be brought straight back to the shooting range to be executed as soon as the misunderstanding had been cleared up. Sometimes, too, mistakes were made despite all the controls that were in place. People who were sentenced only to prison terms were occasionally shot in error, and vice versa. In the latter case it was possible to rectify the mistake, but not in the former one of course. But incidents like the one described below were also not unknown: in the 1950s a person registered as having been shot suddenly reappeared and sent in a petition for rehabilitation written in his own hand. This means of course that in the years 1937–8 someone else must have been shot in his name, either intentionally or in error.
Moscow, 1937 Page 67