Kommunarka shooting ground

[1] 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.

Only on 14 November 1999 did a plaque commemorating the Victims of Political Repression at the "special installation" finally appear, later than at any other mass burial site in Moscow, comments Arseny Roginsky.

[2] A church dedicated to Russia's New Martyrs and Confessors, i.e. those who had died for their Christian faith during the Soviet period, was built at Kommunarka and their feast day was thereafter celebrated each year on or around 25 January.

[9] Most of the other defendants in the Trial of the Twenty One are buried here: Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, Rosengolts, Vladimir Ivanov, Mikhail Chernov, and Isaak Zelensky; Uzbek leaders Akmal Ikramov and Faizulla Khodjaev; Vasily Sharangovich, Prokopy Zubarev, and NKVD officer Pavel Bulanov; Kremlin doctors Lev Levin and Ignaty Kazakov; Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky and Pyotr Kryuchkov, Maxim Gorky's secretary.

Among burials are Mongolian revolutionaries Badrakh, Dogsom, Losol, Luvsanshara and Shijee, the writers Pilnyak, Kirshon, Jasienski, Red Army and NKVD officers Agranov, the Berman brothers, Berzin, Kogan, Pauker, and also two Central Europeans: Bela Kun, who headed the short-lived 1919 Soviet republic in Hungary, and ex-priest Theodore Maly, who recruited Soviet agents abroad and in the mid-1930s.