Kommunarka shooting ground

Common card · No. 215691

The Kommunarka shooting site, often mistakenly called Kommunarka firing range (Russian: Расстрельный полигон «Коммунарка»)—the former dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda—was used as an execution site and mass grave from 1937 to 1941. Executions of those who were sentenced to death, mainly by Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, were performed there by the NKVD during the Great Terror and until 1941. It is also possible that the bodies of people shot elsewhere might have been brought there for burial. As Russian historian Arseny 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 the Great Terror.

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