Film's Description

In 1937, the year of the worst Soviet purges, 688,000 people were executed in the USSR. Most of them were shot and secretly buried; their burial places have been discovered only today.

In this film we want to tell about one of these places: Butovo ‘special zone’, or ‘shooting ground’, set up in Moscow in 1937. 21,000 people were executed here in the 1930s and ’40s; about a thousand of them were priests, monks and bishops. It is quite possible that there is no other place in Russia or anywhere in the world where so many priests were killed. More than 200 of them have been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as martyrs.Throughout the Soviet period, this place was closely guarded by the KGB. Its gates were opened for the victims’ relatives only on June 7th 1993. Today a church is built on the execution ground. Its senior priest is a grandson of Vladimir Ambartsumov, a priest who was executed here and whose tragic and heroic story has a special place in the film. Interviews with historians and testimonies of the victims’ relatives, many of whom were imprisoned themselves, are also used in the film.