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New Martyrs of Russia
Prepared by Father Yves, March 2007
There are very few places in Russia today that honour the memory of those killed by Stalin. One endeavor is at an execution ground and burial site near the village of Butovo, 17 miles south of Moscow. It is now run by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Executions took place here "on an industrial scale" during the Great Terror, said Father Kirill Kaleda, who helps supervise the Butovo New Martyrs Church built on the site. "Some days they executed 500 people or more."
Records show that 20,765 people were executed and buried at Butovo between August 1937 and October 1938, during the peak of Stalin's repressions, Kaleda said.
"A majority were residents of the Moscow region, although you can find executed people here who came from all over the world, including from the United States," he said.
"When I saw the list for the first time, I was astonished to see very many ordinary people among those executed — workers, farmers. Famous politicians were shot here as well as military officers and intellectuals. Almost 1,000 people were executed here because of their Orthodox religious beliefs."
Among those killed was his grandfather, Vladimir A. Ambartsumov, a prominent Russian Orthodox priest.
"When our family found out that our grandfather was shot and buried here, I took part in organizing a parish here and constructing the church," Kaleda said. "We found out in 1989 that my grandfather was shot, and we learned in 1994 about him lying here. Before that, in the 1950s, we had been told that he died of kidney disease in a labor camp in 1943."
He is horrified by the argument that all this was somehow justified. Nostalgia for Stalin, he said, "is simply madness."
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