Kommunarka shooting ground

The Kommunarka firing range (Russian: Расстрельный полигон «Коммунарка»), former dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, was used as a burial ground 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.