Interviewer: And so, now… Were you always religious?

Lyubimova: Always, but not church-going.

Interviewer: But you did go to church, right?

Lyubimova: No, I didn’t go to church very often. I had my son baptized and we had funerals for my nearest relatives. Back then, you know, going to church wasn’t really the thing to do.

Interviewer: That’s why I’m asking, I mean, in that period of the Soviet era it was equivalent to an act of heroism.

Lyubimova: Yes, yes. Not to hide your faith. Now, at the beginning, when we had only just begun working with the police files I was checking everything and typing. Initially, I was typing up these lists by myself. I was shocked by the unbelievable number of priests. I mean, in some of the trials there were 16 people. And always more and more. And at times, well, it was a lot... And I kept thinking, how can I bring this to the patriarch’s attention? But it seemed impossible. And then when we looked at the case of Metropolitan Seraphim who was born Leonid Mikhailovich Chichagov, one of the women in our group called his granddaughter, who later became well-known as Mother Seraphim, and told her, but apparently she didn’t explain herself very well. Mother Seraphim at one point even became frightened, it seems, because she didn’t understand something, and ultimately she started looking around and found me. I got a phone call, and the woman on the line said: “I’m coming to see you”. We were on very good terms and after she appeared we were able to deliver the lists to the patriarch and let him know what happened at Butovo. It was then, when Mother Seraphim appeared, I suppose, well, we were getting close to 300 priests. Now we have nearly a thousand. A total of 944 from the major and minor orders, those in monasteries, parish clerks, and some parishioners. 

The NKVD, an acronym for Narodnyj Komissariat Vnutrennych Del, that is “The Commissariat of People for Internal Affairs”, was established in the very early months after the Bolshevik revolution – from November 1917 and January 1918 – and it started immediately its action against the “enemies of the people”.

At the end of the ‘20s, during the second crisis of the USSR government, the system reinforced its politics of repression, violence and mass terror against internal opponents. By the end of 1927 about 4000 members of the Communist Party were accused of "opposition" and became victims of repressions.

In the mid ‘30s the NKVD took into its hands all repression functions in in USSR. Soon penalty centres and firing grounds spread all over the Union – from Magadan to Donetsk, from Irkutsk to Astrakhan. The darkest period in the whole history of repressions was the so called "Great Terror" or "ezhovschina", when Nikolay Ezhov was the head of the NKVD. In 1937-38 the so called "special troikas of the NKVD" – a special judicial and executive group of three officials, the head of the regional administration of the NKVD, the secretary of the regional committee and the prosecutor – were in charge for framing up cases, making quick decisions and performing death penalties without delay.

The majority of the huge number of people murdered, imprisoned, and exiled by the NKVD between 1936 and 1941 were political activists, priests and believers, intellectuals, governmental officials of different levels, military and police functionaries, and activists of national movements. From 1921 to 1953 the number of victims of the political terror is estimated about 12,5 million people (according to the definition of the law for rehabilitation of the victims of state terror), as stated by the Director of "Memorial", the famous international historic and civil rights association operating in Russia.

 
Among the most famous places of mass execution and common graves of those years we can mention:

Rzhevsky artillery ground (Saint-Petersburg, Russia)
Presumably more than 30 thousand victims

Levashovskoe Memorial Cemetery (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) 
About 45 thousand victims of Stalin's repressions of 1937-54.

Butovo ground (Moscow, Russia)
About 20 thousand victims of terror in the 1930-50s., among them 944 priests and consecrated people

Communarka shooting ground (Moscow region, Russia)
14 thousand victims of terror in the 1930-50s.

Rutchenkovskoe field (Donetsk, Ukraine)
7 thousand victims of repressions in the 1930-40s.

Kuropaty area (Minsk, Belorussia)
7 thousand victims of repressions in the 1930-40s, 30 thousand according to other estimates.

Serpantinka prison (Kolyma, Russia)
About 10 thousand prisoners were shot and buried here. Much more died on the way to the area or in the Kolyma mines.

Petrozavodsk (Karelia, Russia)
An area where 7 thousand prisoners of the Solovky prison camp were shot and buried.