According to Arseny Roginsky, "firing range" was a popular euphemism adopted to describe the mysterious and closely-guarded plots of land that the NKVD began to set aside for mass burials on the eve of the Great Terror.

[6] Notable victims at Butovo include Gustav Klutsis, Seraphim Chichagov and Saul Bron; in addition, more than 1000 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy.

Butovo is first mentioned in historical texts in 1568 as owned by Fyodor Drozhin, a boyar of Ivan the Terrible, and the area south of Moscow was occupied by the small settlement of Kosmodemyanskoye Drozhino (named after Saints Cosmas and Damian) until the 19th century.

[8] In the 1920s, the Red Army ceded the site, now officially named Butovo after a nearby town, to the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union, as an agricultural colony.

To address the issue, the NKVD allocated two new special facilities – Butovo and Kommunarka shooting ground – to serve as a combination of execution site and mass grave.

[15][16] Most victims were led to a long barrack, ostensibly for a medical exam, where there was a roll call and reconciliation of people with file dossiers including photos.

After sunrise, NKVD officers, often drunk off the bucket of vodka provided to them,[4] would escort prisoners away from the barracks and shoot them at close range to the back of the head, often with a Nagant M1895 revolver.

[11] In particular, the Kommunarka witnessed executions of high-profile political and public figures from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and Comintern leaders from Germany, Romania, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Finland, and Hungary.

[21] Butovo's status as a main execution site meant many notable people were killed and buried at the site including Soviet military commander Hayk Bzhishkyan; Tsarist statesman Vladimir Dzhunkovsky; the painter Aleksandr Drevin, film actress Marija Leiko, and photographer Gustav Klutsis who were all Latvian; Orthodox bishop Seraphim Chichagov, and Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy; former President of the State Duma Fyodor Golovin; the first Russian aviator Nikolai Danilevsky; composer Mikhail Khitrovo-Kramskoi; theoretical physicist Hans Hellmann; anthropologist Ivar Lassy; five tsarist generals and representatives of Russian noble families such as the Rostopchins, the Tuchkovs, the Gagarins, the Obolenskys, the Olsufiyevs, and the Bibikovs.

In October 1993, a plaque was inaugurated that read "In this zone of the Butovo shooting range, several thousand people were, in 1937–1938, shot in secret and buried.

[24] On 30 October 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin commemorated the 70th anniversary of the repressions by visiting the Butovo Firing Range, attributing the deaths of victims to the "excesses of the political conflict.

"[4] Putin's statement was criticized by some and pointed out this statement signaled the failure of Putin, and perhaps Russian society as a whole, to come to grips with the fact that the victims of Butovo were killed not because they were political opponents of Stalin, but simply because of their backgrounds, nationalities, or that they simply were caught up in the purge mechanism that sought to repress or eliminate large swaths of potential dissenters to Stalin's rule.