Kommunarka shooting ground

The Kommunarka Shooting Site often mistakenly called Kommunarka firing range (Russian: Расстрельный полигон «Коммунарка»), former dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, was used as an execution site and mass grave from 1937 to 1941. Executions may have been carried out there by the NKVD during the Great Terror and until the war started; alternatively, bodies of those shot elsewhere might have been brought there for later interment. 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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