In 2018, at the initiative of the Gulag History Museum and with the support of the Memory Fund, prospecting work, which changed the idea of ​​the location of the mass grave on the territory of the former special facility of the NKVD of the USSR, the Kommunarka firing range. The studies made it possible to clarify the location of the grave ditches, to preliminarily estimate the area of ​​the pits, and to supplement the history of the landfill near important details, according to a press release received by the editors of Sterlegrad.

Under the guidance of archaeologist and author of the study Mikhail Zhukovsky and head of the Department of Archeology of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov Doctor of History Anatoly Kantorovich, a retrospective analysis of the territory of the special facility was carried out using unique aerial photography data from the period of the Great Patriotic War and modern methods computer photogrammetry. The data obtained were supplemented by a visual survey of the area and the laying of several stratigraphic sections.

According to Mikhail Zhukovsky, the research revealed that the glades in the eastern and southern parts of the landfill were not used as places mass graves and had a different purpose. visual inspection and stratigraphic sections within one of the glades did not reveal any signs of earthworks. Studies have shown that the site of mass graves at the site was located in its far, western part, on the right bank of the river. Ordynka, in a clearing left over from an old deforestation. As a result of the work carried out, up to 75% of burials were identified. Mikhail Zhukovsky notes that the pits of the pits are not located randomly, but in certain sequence, and this information, together with archival research, will later help to establish who exactly owns the graves.

After research by the Memory Foundation and the Museum of the History of the Gulag, a lot of work was done to lay a trail to the mass grave site, now it is accessible to the public, including visitors with limited mobility.

“The conducted research, combined with archival research and the collection of eyewitness accounts, allowed us to most accurately localize the places of mass graves of the repressed and thereby create a solid historical basis for the museumification of Kommunarka. We hope that in the future a large memorial complex will be created here, where relatives of the people buried here, as well as groups of schoolchildren, will be able to visit,” says Roman Romanov, director of the Gulag History Museum and head of the Memory Fund.

The former special object of the NKVD of the USSR "Kommunarka" is one of the five known places of mass graves of those who were shot in Moscow. From September 2, 1937 to November 24, 1941, 6,609 people were buried on the territory of Kommunarka.

“The cases were considered in accordance with the decision of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR of December 1, 1934 - without the participation of lawyers, without calling witnesses and without the right to appeal the verdict. Among those buried here are prominent politicians Tsarist Russia and ministers of the Provisional Government, statesmen the Baltic countries forcibly annexed to the USSR in 1940. Representatives of more than 60 nationalities lie in this land, ”says Yan Rachinsky, historian, chairman of the board of the Memorial society.

Down to the end Soviet power"Kommunarka" remained a protected special facility, the existence of a burial place here became known only in 1991.

In the spring of 1999, the territory of the firing range was transferred from the FSB of the Russian Federation to the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2007, the church of Sts. New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in Kommunarka.

Volunteers from the Memorial Society and the Gulag History Museum have been involved in clearing and landscaping the territory of the former special facility for several years.

Information about the former special facility and monuments already erected by relatives and colleagues of those shot on the territory of the firing range will be presented on the special website of the Iofe Foundation "Necropolis of Terror and Gulag".

In the fall of 2018 with the blessing His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, on the territory of Kommunarka, a monument "Wall of Memory" will be erected with all the well-known names of the victims of terror resting here.

FROM THE REPORT OF THE CITY ADMINISTRATION OF PUBLIC SERVICES AND WORK FOR THE YEAR OF THE WAR FROM JUNE 1941 TO JUNE 1942
SECTION "FUNERAL BUSINESS"
5 April 1943
Secret
VI. Funeral business. Burial of the corpses of people - victims of enemy bombing, shelling and blockade.

The organization and conduct of burials of human corpses in the city are entrusted to the Funeral Business trust, subordinate to the department. The burial was carried out at 11 operating city cemeteries under the trust.
During the first half of 1941, the Funeral Business trust buried 18,909 dead, which is an average of 105 per day.
To serve the needs of the population in burial, by the beginning of the war, the trust had: a) transport for transporting the dead to cemeteries in the amount of 12 buses and 34 horses; b) carpentry and wreath workshops, producing coffins, wreaths and fully satisfying the demand of the population; c) monumental workshops that made and installed monuments, fences, etc.
By the beginning of the war, the cemeteries were served by 109 gravediggers, 64 cleaners and 77 watchmen.
The burial work proceeded normally without any difficulties.
At the same time, even in peacetime, the headquarters of the city's MPVO, through the management of the Funeral Business trust, were entrusted with the development and implementation of measures for cleaning and transporting from the lesions to cemeteries, registration and burial of the corpses of people who became victims of air bombardments and shelling.
But, in addition to the outlines for the formation of the trust "Funeral business" special detachment from the vehicles of the trust and the workers of the cemeteries for cleaning up the corpses of people from the lesions and transporting them to the cemeteries, nothing was done in peacetime.
The beginning of the Patriotic War and the approach of enemy troops to the city of Leningrad forced the trust and the administration to urgently carry out a number of measures to prepare for the transportation of human corpses from the centers of defeat to the cemeteries, the execution of documents for them and burial.
In July 1941, at the request of the administration and the trust, the last Architectural and Planning Directorate of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council were allotted land plots for the needs of burying possible victims of enemy bombing and shelling in the following places:
1. The right bank of the Neva - near the Vesyoliy Poselok - Volodarsky district.
2. Old village- north of the Serafimovsky cemetery - Primorsky district.
3. Kurakina road - at the station. Kupchino - Moscow region.
4. Krasnokabatskoe highway - Kirovsky district.
5. East of the Bogoslovsky cemetery - Krasnogvardeisky district.
6. Bolshaya Okhta - east of the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery - Krasnogvardeisky district.
7. Volkova village - southwest of the Tatar cemetery - Moskovsky district.
8. Island of the Decembrists - from the embankment of the Smolenka River - Vasilyevsky Island.

During July and the first half of August 1941, the Funeral Business trust built on the first 6 newly allotted land plots in an economic way light type boardwalk morgues. They were intended to store the corpses of people from the moment they were delivered from the lesions to the burial place. Temporary mortuaries were not built on the last two plots of land, since there were ready-made buildings next to them, which were used as morgues. The morgues were equipped with wooden trestle beds, upholstered with oilcloth, for folding corpses delivered from the lesions.
From the moment the construction of morgues began, i.e. from the first days of July 1941, and until the first days of November 1941, by the workers of the Funeral Business trust, and partly by the forces of workers attracted by the executive committees of the district councils of workers' deputies, 280 trenches measuring 20x2.5x1.7 meters were dug on the allotted land plots. A more significant supply of trenches was dug at special sites near the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery and on the island of the Decembrists. Morgues and dug trenches on special sites on Kurakina road - at the station. Kupchino and on the Krasnokabatsky highway did not have to be used, because. at the end of August 1941, they found themselves in a zone of military operations and intense enemy shelling.
In the first days of the Patriotic War, under the management of the Funeral Business trust, a detachment of 21 people with 4 buses attached to it was formed from the workers of the latter's enterprises. The personnel of the detachment were provided with rubber boots, aprons, gloves and transferred to the barracks, and the duty unit was on round-the-clock duty in managing the trust. Permanent representatives were seconded from the detachment to the medical and sanitary service of the city for live communication, through whom the medical and sanitary service of the city's MPVO headquarters called the teams and vehicles of the detachment to the centers of defeat to clean up the corpses and transport them to morgues.

From the beginning of the Patriotic War, from June 22 to September 8, 1941, there was a tense organizational and preparatory period for the air defense of the city in all areas, including the burial area. The systematic bombardment that began on September 8, 1941, and later the artillery shelling of the city, was accompanied by destruction and loss of life. From that time on, the hard work of the Burial Business Trust detachment began. The teams of the detachment, at the direction of their permanent representative at the medical and sanitary service of the headquarters of the MPVO of the city, travel around the clock to the centers of destruction, remove the corpses of people - victims of bombing and shelling, transport them to morgues to special sites, where the corpses were laid out on trestle beds and, in accordance with the instructions approved headquarters of the city's MPVO were kept for 48 hours for identification by relatives.
During the first period of bombing and shelling, 80-85% of the corpses delivered to morgues from the centers of destruction were identified by relatives and buried in the usual individually in the cemeteries of the city. After 48 hours, unidentified corpses were photographed by a representative of the relevant police department assigned to morgues, identification certificates were drawn up, death certificates were issued in the registry offices on the basis of acts of a police representative and doctors, after which such corpses were buried in trenches by cemetery workers assigned to special sites. Above each buried in the trench, a wooden column painted in red was installed, on which the name of the buried was written, and if it was impossible to establish the identity, it was written - "Unknown". Valuables found with the corpses were confiscated by a police representative and the latter, according to acts, were handed over to representatives of the relevant districts. Morgues built on special sites, where the corpses of people who fell victim to enemy bombing and shelling, were delivered from all the centers of defeat, mainly by the transport of the Funeral Business trust detachment, were terrible sight. Here one could see mutilated, disfigured corpses of people, parts of corpses, that is, torn off heads, legs, arms, crushed skulls, corpses of infants, corpses of women with corpses of infants and other ages of children tightly hugged in the agony of death. In the morgues from morning until dark, people wandered with sad, embittered faces and looked for: parents - dead children, children - dead parents, brothers - sisters, sisters - brothers and just acquaintances.
As the bombardment increased, so did the number of burials from month to month, as evidenced by the following figures:
July 1941 - 3688 burials
August 1941 - 5090 >>
September 1941 - 7820 >>
October 1941 - 9355 >>
November 1941 - 11 401 >>

Despite the significant growth of burials in the city from month to month due to the victims of enemy bombardments and shelling, the Funeral Business Trust satisfactorily coped with the burials until December 1941. True, there were difficulties in meeting the demand of the population for coffins; since the carpentry and wreath workshop of the trust (in terms of its production capacity and in connection with the conscription of a part of male craftsmen to the Red Army) was not able to satisfy the rapidly growing demands of the population for this type of product.
The Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Working People's Deputies, by decision No. 697-s of October 14, 1941, ordered Lendrevbumtrest (manager Comrade Shishalov) to organize the production of coffins at the enterprises of the trust by October 20, 1941, ensuring the daily production of 200-250 coffins.
Lendrevbumtrest and its manager, comrade Shishalov, underestimated the importance of the decision of the SZ executive committee on the production of coffins and systematically underproduced up to 100 coffins per day - this aggravated the situation with the satisfaction of the ever-increasing demand for coffins, and the decision of the SZ executive committee dated November 21, 1941 No. 810-s to the manager Comrade Shishalov was reprimanded by the trust for failure to comply with the decision of the SZ executive committee of October 14, 1941. But the 350 coffins [per day] produced by the Lenbumtrest enterprises and the workshops of the Funeral Business trust did not satisfy the demand to any extent; in particular, demand increased in early December, which forced the Council of Ministers of the Executive Committee by decision No. 881-c of December 14, 1941, to oblige the chairmen of the executive committees of the district councils to organize the production of the simplest type of coffins at enterprises and regional workshops and release them for sale to the population at least 15 pieces per day for each region.

The enemy blockade of the city, which continued from the second half of August 1941, and the lack of food supplies forced the introduction in November 1941 of the norm for issuing so-called bread on a working food card of 250 and an employee of 125 grams per person per day, provided that there were almost no other products was not issued.
This situation with the supply of the population of the city with bread and other products was not slow to affect an unprecedented increase in mortality.
In addition to the incessant enemy bombardments and daily artillery shelling, which snatched dozens and hundreds of lives from the ranks of Leningraders heroically defending their beloved city every day, in December a terrible specter of hunger approached the city and its population. Already at the beginning of December in the city, more and more often one could meet emaciated people, with swollen faces, swollen legs and a slow, unsteady gait, leaning on sticks when walking. There were often cases when people of different ages, often young men, without any visible external cause fell on pavements and panels and were unable to do without outside help rise. Some of them got up and trudged on, no longer reacting to anything around them - people, moving vehicles, artillery shelling, and partly died right there on the street, and their corpses remained lying here on the street for some time, while a police representative with the help of janitors or other persons will not be removed into the courtyard of the house, where they often lay long time, and then one by one or several on sleds, trucks, cars [they were sent] to the nearest hospital for the dead, and at the end of December, when the hospitals for the dead were overcrowded and refused to accept corpses, at night they were simply thrown to the nearest hospitals and clinics, on the streets and squares. Mortality among the population of the city due to exhaustion from hunger, severe cold, lack of firewood in December 1941 increased sharply and, according to incomplete data from the Funeral Business trust, reached 42,050 people, which, in relation to the mortality rate in November 1941, was an increase of 247 %.

The apparatus of the "Funeral business" trust with its staff of cemeteries and offices turned out to be completely unprepared for carrying out burial work on such an unprecedented scale for the following reasons:
a) the volume of work on the transportation of corpses and their burial turned out to be unprecedentedly large, unexpectedly, unscheduled, fell to the share of the trust;
b) the positions of deputy manager of the trust, head of the transport office were not filled in the apparatus of the trust; chief engineer of the Trust Sadofiev, head of the office for the operation of cemeteries Piontkovsky and a number of other workers were out of order due to illness due to exhaustion;
c) gravediggers of cemeteries, which until December 1, 1941 consisted of 109 people according to the list - these are people who performed a large physical work digging graves, who ate and drank a lot of vodka and beer, found themselves on a ration of 250 grams of bread, in the first days of December, with the exception of a few, turned out to be sick due to exhaustion, unable to work, and 46 of them subsequently died;
d) the transport of the trust was not designed for such a volume of transportation of corpses that had to be carried out in December;
e) the trenches prepared according to the MPVO plan in the fall, which were not designed for December mortality, were completely used in the first few days of December.
And the mortality rate among the population of the city grew and grew every day, the transport of the trust not only completely refused to satisfy the population's requests for transporting the dead from the city to the cemeteries, but far from coped with the removal of corpses from hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers and other places. The demand of the population for coffins was far from being satisfied and could not be satisfied. The population was forced to resort to private methods of making coffins, which was used by speculators and marauders who demanded bread and other products from the customer, and people who were starving themselves, but who wanted to pay their last debt to the deceased close person, for the manufacture of the coffin gave their the last crumbs bread or cards of the dead (see document No. 130), and those who did not have bread to pay for the manufacture of the coffin, either knocked together a box from doors, old boards, plywood, or simply sewed the corpse of the deceased into a sheet, blanket (doll). This last method, as the easiest and simplest, was especially widely used. Only in solitary cases did the population manage to use the transport of institutions and enterprises to transport the dead to cemeteries, and basically the dead were transported on sleds, handcarts, baby carriages, on sheets of plywood, etc.
Many peculiar funeral processions moved around the city, and on the street highways leading directly to the cemeteries (Smolensky pr., Georgievskaya st., Novoderevenskaya st. 16-17 of the Vasilyevsky Island line, etc.), they represented a continuous line. They made a deep impression on the population of the city. In a thick haze of bitter frosts, wrapped human figures slowly and silently with shopping bags moved along the streets of the besieged, unconquered city, dragging behind them sledges, plywood sheets with one or more dead people laid on them in makeshift coffins, boxes or sewn into blankets or sheets, and sometimes pushing a handcart in front of them with a dead person bouncing on it, or moving a baby carriage in front of them with a dead person sewn into a blanket-sheet and seated in it. In front of the entrances to the cemeteries, hundreds of people, sledges, carts, cars, baby carriages accumulated.

Cemetery desks were packed full of people. Here, people were waiting for paperwork, looking for any of the cemetery workers to allocate a place for burial, but did not find them, since there were very few of them, and even they were busy with mass trench burial. The so-called cemetery "wolves" with crowbars, shovels, axes and sledgehammers crowded here. These people, taking advantage of the misfortune of others, their impotence, the absence of full-time gravediggers in cemeteries, for bread, cereals, tobacco, vodka, ration cards were hired to dig graves, selling them ready-made, but since there was no supervision of their work by the cemetery administration, and the citizens who delivered the deceased, tired and chilled, could not always wait for the end of the burial of the dead, the "wolves" in some cases threw the unburied dead on , sometimes they tore off shallow pits-graves, put or laid a "doll" (a dead person sewn into a blanket or sheet), covered it with some earth or just snow and considered their job done. Citizens who brought the deceased to the cemetery with good intentions - to dig a grave and bury it on their own, received a place or simply chose it themselves, began to dig a grave, but due to the fact that the ground was frozen one to one and a half meters, [and] they did not have the necessary tool and physical strength, dug a hole for the purpose, covered it with an insignificant layer of earth or snow and left, and some simply, having tried to dig a grave (which was very difficult), threw the deceased into the cemetery and left.
From the middle of December 1941, cemeteries, especially Serafimovskoye, Bolsheokhtinskoye and Volkovo, presented the following picture: In front of the gates of cemeteries right on the street, on the cemeteries themselves near offices, churches, on paths, in ditches, on graves and between them dozens, and sometimes hundreds, the abandoned dead lay in coffins and without them; Gradually, the workers of the cemeteries and the recruits removed them, buried them in trenches, but the dead continued to be thrown up, and this spectacle remained until March.
In January and February, the death rate increased, and people became even more physically weak from exhaustion, and in connection with this, individual burial was also reduced, the transportation of the dead to cemeteries by the population itself. Already in December, the transport of the Funeral Business trust clearly could not cope with the removal of the corpses of dead people from hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers and other places. By December 19, more than 7 thousand of them had accumulated in the city. Back in the first decade of December in the hospital. On the 25th anniversary of October, several hundred corpses lay openly in the report cards right in the courtyard and near the fence on the territory of the Trinity collective farm market. On this issue, December 19 at 5 o'clock. In the morning, a meeting was convened with the Deputy Head of the NKVD Directorate for Leningrad region comrade Ivanov, which was attended by me, the head of the MPVO of Leningrad, Major General comrade Lagutkin, the head of the City Health Department, comrade Nikitsky, the head of the MPVO department of the UNKVD LO, Colonel Derevyanko, the commander of the 4th regiment of the NKVD, Colonel Sidorov and the head of the Workers 'and Peasants' Militia Leningrad Comrade Glushko. At the meeting, it was found that there are more than 7,000 corpses in the city that have not been removed. The meeting decided to organize an urgent removal of corpses to the cemeteries by motor vehicles of the city's MPVO, the 4th regiment of the NKVD, the police department and the funeral business trusts and street cleaning. Among these organizations were distributed hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers, where there were corpses, and in the morning, immediately after the end of the meeting, work began. Personally, I went directly from the meeting to the Funeral Business trust and took over the organization and conduct of work on the removal of corpses, since there were not enough personnel in the apparatus of the trust, and one head of the MPVO headquarters of the trust, Kalistratov, was disabled (walked on crutches) , although he was conscientious about his work, he was not able to manage the work of transport. For the removal of corpses, 3 five-ton vehicles of the 2nd motor depot of the street cleaning trust and 3 vehicles of the Funeral Business trust were involved, and 50 people - MPVO fighters were allocated to load onto vehicles and unload corpses. From December 19 to December 25, 4591 corpses were taken out. If it was possible to somewhat clear the city of a blockage of corpses, although not for a long time, then the situation in the cemeteries significantly worsened.

There were no free trenches in the cemeteries, there was nowhere to bury the corpses, and they were stacked in cemeteries: Volkov, Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky and the island of the Decembrists. The trenches prepared in summer and autumn were already filled, and 270 workers, mobilized by the executive committees of the district councils, were at the disposal of the trust, according to the decision of the Executive Committee of December 6, 1941 No. 852-s for digging trenches on the right bank of the Neva near the Vesyoliy Poselok, on the island of Decembrists and cemeteries: Volkovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky and Piskarevsky, did not give positive results. They were sent to work inaccurately, with large gaps and did not give output.
The burial work carried out in the first half of December showed that its scale had grown from the departmental framework of the Funeral Business trust into a citywide problem that could not be resolved without the direct participation of the executive committees of district councils in this work, without the involvement of construction organizations with their mechanisms and MPVO formations. as a physically healthy force and as a demolition specialist. On December 25, 1941, the Council of Ministers of the executive committee adopted decision No. 57-s on the issue of streamlining the work of city cemeteries, in which it noted that the city cemeteries were in a clearly unsatisfactory condition. By this decision, Koshman, the manager, was dismissed from work as not ensuring the normal operation of the trust, and specific measures were outlined to streamline the work of cemeteries, namely:
a) the chairmen of the district councils, in whose districts the cemeteries are located, were invited to visit full order at the cemeteries, having completed the cleansing of morgues and the burial of all unburied corpses, sanitary standards for burial have been established and the chairmen have been warned that they will be personally responsible for the admission of unburied corpses in the cemeteries in the future;
b) it was proposed to the head of the city police Comrade Grushko: to prohibit the transportation of corpses around the city without coffins, establishing that all corpses should be handed over to district mortuaries, and from there they should be transported in an organized manner to cemeteries; clear cemeteries of random gravediggers (speculators), bring malicious ones to criminal responsibility;
c) the chairmen of executive committees, district councils and UPKO were asked to put things in order in the organization of the work of cemeteries and stop the population from breaking crosses and fences in cemeteries;
d) it was allowed to carry out mass burial at the following new sites: at Bolsheokhtinsky, Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky and behind the Tatar cemeteries, on the island of Decembrists and near the Vesyoliy Poselok;
e) it was proposed to UPKO to transfer the construction office of the green construction trust to the trust "Pokhoronnoe delo" for the performance of trench digging;
e) the chiefs of the UZHS comrade were obliged. Drozdov and UKBS comrade Kutin to allocate 4 fully serviceable excavators with the necessary personnel for digging trenches at the disposal of the UPKO on a rental basis;
g) before December 28, 1941, the chairmen of the executive committees of the district councils were asked to organize district morgues to collect corpses in them, draw up documents and transport them to cemeteries for burial at the expense of the district councils;
h) in order to prevent the accumulation of corpses in hospitals and hospitals, the city health department was asked to establish a minimum period for processing documents, and the UPKO, upon registration, to take out the corpses to cemeteries for burial within 24 hours. As a temporary measure, it was allowed to bury corpses from hospitals and hospitals according to the lists compiled by them, with subsequent registration through the registry office;
i) the staff of gravediggers at city cemeteries has been increased to 200 units, the positions of deputy heads of cemeteries have been introduced, the salaries of senior cemeteries have been revised upwards, and the rates of payment for gravediggers for digging graves have been increased.
The measures taken and carried out for a short period improved the matter of burials in city cemeteries, but since the number of the dead arriving at cemeteries in January 1942 more than doubled compared to December 1941, [these measures] turned out to be insufficient and did not provide timely burial of incoming corpses. The death rate was steadily growing, and the population was weak from exhaustion, the whole burden of burial fell on the trust and the executive committees of the district councils. If in December a significant part of the dead was transported to cemeteries by the population, then in January this sharply decreased. accepted big sizes such a phenomenon when the dead began to be thrown en masse to hospitals, clinics, thrown onto stairs, into courtyards and even onto the streets of the city. Organizations and enterprises took the corpses of dead people out of the city and, fearing that the administration of the cemeteries would not accept them due to the lack of documents, dumped the corpses unnoticed by the guards in the cemeteries or on the streets near them. On Kremenchugskaya street at the outer doors of the deceased hospital. Botkin daily randomly in a heap lay the abandoned dead. In addition, they could often be seen in the mornings thrown to the gates of houses, on the stairs. At the entrance to the cemeteries, abandoned corpses of people lay on the roads, in ditches, in the bushes, they could also be found in landfills taken out along with garbage - this took place on the road going from the Bogoslovsky cemetery to Piskarevskaya road east of the 1st vegetable combine.

In January, again, unburied corpses accumulated in the city and in the cemeteries, although by this time there was more order in the cemeteries, since the executive committees of the district councils came to grips with the cemeteries, attached responsible workers to manage the work on them: a deputy was attached to the Volkov cemetery. Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Moscow District Council Comrade Romanov, Dekabristov Island - Deputy. Karakozov, chairman of the executive committee of the Vasileostrovsky district, and the chairman of the executive committee, Comrade Kuskov, daily took care of the cemetery, to Serafimovsky - deputy. Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Primorsky District.
From January 1942, the energetic engineer Chaikin P.I. came to the leadership of the Funeral Business trust, and Koshman, who was removed from work, was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in prison by the Military Tribunal for failure to take measures to prepare the required number of spare trenches and streamline work cemeteries.
In January, cases of cannibalism were established in the city, they gradually spread. Cemeteries were poorly guarded due to the lack of the required number of people and their employment in other jobs. From the cemeteries, parts of the corpses cut right there began to be stolen, a special predilection was manifested for children's corpses, corpses abandoned in the city were cut and stolen, for example:
1. On Jewish cemetery it was found that a severed head and feet were left in the opened unburied coffin, and all other parts of the body were taken away.
2. At the Serafimovsky cemetery, the head of the cemetery, Belyaevsky, and the district police inspector found the severed head of the deceased, the traces from the place where the head was found led to wooden houses located on the western outskirts of the cemetery, where it was discovered that the inhabitants of the houses were cooking human meat.
3. In the evening of March 1942, the watchman of the Bogoslovsky cemetery, Comrade Samsonova, detained a citizen who was taking something out of the cemetery on a hand sled in a mattress pad, and during the examination, five children's corpses were found in a bag. The citizen was sent to the police.
4. On Kremenchugskaya street not far from the mortuary hospital named after. Botkin, a corpse with severed soft parts body.
5. Skulls were found in cemeteries, from which brains [were] extracted...
The severed parts of the dead were often found in cemeteries. Such body parts were often found, especially in the spring when the snow melted, in residential areas of the city and taken to cemeteries for burial. This situation forced police guards to be placed on all large cemeteries.

On January 15, 1942, the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, by decision No. 34-s, in order to intensify work on digging trenches for mass graves, ordered all chairmen of the executive committees of district councils to send 400 people to special stages by January 17, 1942, allowing them, if necessary, to transfer workers from the defense construction work. This decision was fully implemented only by the executive committee of the district council of the Krasnogvardeisky district. They formed a special battalion headed by Comrade Matyushin. The battalion carried out work at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery on digging trenches, burying and putting the trenches in order in the spring. Digging trenches at the Serafimovsky cemetery and burial was entrusted to the headquarters of the city's MPVO, which did a lot of work there. Demolition work, trench digging and burial at the Piskarevsky cemetery were entrusted to the 40th regiment of the NKVD. In connection with the severe frosts exceeding -25 ° C, and the freezing of the soil by 1.5 meters, the executive committee allocated vodka to the headquarters of the MPVO, the 4th regiment of the NKVD and the Funeral Business trust for issuance to workers and soldiers who worked on digging trenches and burial.
Since the lack of the required number of trenches for mass burial was always a brake, and 4 excavators of the Komsomolets type, allocated by the decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council of December 25, 1941, by the departments of housing and cultural and community construction, did not justify themselves in digging trenches, the city committee On January 20, 1942, the 5th Special Construction Directorate (Soyuzekskavation), the head of Comrade Chernyshev, who had powerful AK-type excavators and experienced qualified personnel, was obliged to begin digging trenches at the Piskaryovskoye cemetery on January 20, 1942. This department, headed by Comrade Chernyshev, began work and carried it out successfully. The Piskaryovskoye cemetery, where comrade Valeryanova Antonina Vladimirovna worked and currently works as a head, as a new one, having a significant land plot, was the main place for mass burial. Here, from December 16, 1941 to May 1, 1942, 129 trenches were dug and buried, not counting the military site. In this cemetery there are 6 trenches 4-5 meters deep, 6 meters wide and up to 180 meters long, which contained 20 more than a thousand corpses each. According to unverifiable data, in this cemetery in just two and a half months, that is, from January 1 to March 15, 1942, about 200 thousand dead were buried, and in total from December 1941 to June 1, 1942 - 371 428.

The last days of January and February were the period when the number of burials reached its highest point. In hospitals, hospitals, at evacuation centers and in regional morgues, a large number of corpses again accumulated. Emergency measures were needed, and the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, by decision of February 2, 1942 No. 72-c, ordered:
1. The chairmen of the executive committees of the district councils, the UPKO and the head of the city's MPVO, Major General Lagutkin, within five days, remove the corpses from the district morgues, hospitals, hospitals and bury them in city cemeteries.
2. Every day, allocate the following number of large trucks with trailers for the removal of corpses: ATUL - 10 cars, MPVO - 15 cars, UPKO - 5 cars, executive committees of district councils - at least 2 cars per day each.
3. The head of the city's air defense, Major General Lagutkin, to assign 100 air defense fighters to the ATUL and UPKO vehicles for loading and unloading corpses.
4. Installed for car drivers and workers transporting corpses additionally for every second and subsequent trips 100 grams of bread, 50 grams of vodka or 100 grams of wine, and for workers working on the reception, dispatch and burial of corpses, an additional 100 grams of bread and 100 grams vodka or wine per day. This paragraph of the decision of the executive committee on February 2, 1942 was approved by a resolution of the Military Council of the front.
5. He ordered Major General Lagutkin to allocate for daily work to the special site the islands of the Decembrists, to the Serafimovsky and Bogoslovsky cemeteries of the city's MPVO fighters, which ensure the complete burial of all incoming corpses.

The trust established the norms for loading corpses for each vehicle, depending on the tonnage, that is, 100 corpses for a 5-ton truck, 60 corpses for a 3-ton truck, and 40 corpses for a one and a half ton truck.
By the above decision of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council of February 2, 1942, the issue of transporting corpses from the city to cemeteries was successfully resolved, but the issue of burial was not resolved, since there were no required number of ready-made trenches, despite the well-conducted 5th OSU work on digging trenches. The excavators worked around the clock in frosts reaching -30 and more degrees. Distinguished at work: excavator foremen brothers TT. Galankin Nikolai Mikhailovich and who did not leave work for several days and ensured the implementation of the norms by 200%; head of the section Ruchevsky Georgy Petrovich and deputy. Alexander Nikitichna Gladkay, chief engineer of the 5th OSU, who, without leaving home for 2-3 days, spent a large organizational work and ensured the timely start of work and their successful implementation; the senior foreman of the site Shchelokov Ivan Alexandrovich, who supervised the work day and night and showed a lot of energy and perseverance in fulfilling the special task.
It must be said frankly that the excavation work well carried out by the 5th OSU on digging trenches basically solved the problem of burying human corpses.
During a significant number of days in February, 6-7 thousand corpses per day were brought for burial only at the Piskarevsky cemetery. In connection with the additional progressive issuance of bread and vodka for the removal of corpses, motor vehicles were used very intensively. It was possible to observe 5-ton motor vehicles moving around the city, loaded in bulk with the corpses of people one and a half times higher than the sides of the motor vehicle, poorly covered, and 5-6 workers were sitting on top. The issue of the removal of corpses was resolved positively.

In addition to working excavators, in February 1942, about 4,000 people worked in the cemeteries of the city every day. These were MPVO fighters who worked at the Serafimovsky, Bogoslovsky, Bolsheokhtinsky cemeteries and the special site of the Decembrists Island; soldiers of the 4th regiment of the NKVD, under the leadership of a very energetic and strong-willed major Matveev, worked at the Piskarevsky cemetery; workers and employees of factories, factories and institutions involved in work in the order of labor conscription. Special teams of the MPVO and the 4th regiment of the NKVD carried out subversive work, from which a cannonade of explosions thundered around the clock in such cemeteries as Serafimovskoye and Piskarevskoye. The rest of the soldiers, workers and employees after the explosion manually dug trenches, laid the dead in them, took the dead out of the coffins (since burial in coffins in trenches took up a lot of space, and there were not enough trenches), buried trenches filled with the dead. Despite such a scale of work on digging trenches, they were still lacking. Urgent measures were needed to resolve the issue of burial. Dig the required number of trenches in short term it was impossible, it was impossible to accumulate corpses in the city and in cemeteries.
On February 3, 1942, the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council decided to use the sand pit at the Bogoslovsky cemetery for a mass grave, which was filled with 60 thousand corpses of people within 5-6 days. Bomb craters at the Bogoslovsky cemetery were also used for burial, in which about 1000 corpses were buried. Later it was decided to use part of the anti-tank ditch located next to the sand pit with north side, where more than 10 thousand dead were also buried. On the northern outskirts of the Serafimovsky cemetery, the existing 18 wolf pits, prepared as anti-tank obstacles, were used for burial, and about 15,000 corpses were buried in them. But the rate of arrival of corpses at the cemeteries significantly outstripped the rapidly increasing pace of trench preparation, and therefore the measures taken to use the quarry and wolf pits for burial did not eliminate the disproportion between the presence of ready-made trenches and the delivery of corpses to the cemeteries. At the Piskaryovskoye cemetery, the number of unburied corpses, stacked in piles up to 180-200 meters long and up to 2 meters high, due to the lack of trenches on certain days of February reached 20-25 thousand; at the Serafimovsky cemetery, it was filled with corpses, and some of them lay simply in the cemetery. A stack of corpses of about 5 thousand lay at the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery, and the mortuary was completely filled with corpses there. At the Cemetery named after the Victims on January 9, about 3,000 unburied corpses lay in a hay barn.

This situation in the cemeteries lasted until the end of February 1942, that is, until the onset turning point when it began, although slowly, but the decline in the flow of corpses for burial in cemeteries, due to a decrease in mortality in the city. In an even worse situation than the city of Leningrad, in terms of burial, the city of Kolpino is located, due to its close proximity to the positions of the Nazi troops. Kolpintsy had the idea of ​​cremating human corpses in the thermal furnaces of the Izhora plant, and the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies, by decision SZ of February 27, 1942 No. 140-s, allowed the executive committee of the Kolpinsky District Council to burn the corpses of people in thermal furnaces. Kolpintsy of corpses of people in thermal furnaces suggested the idea of ​​the deputy chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council comrade Reshkin, who directly supervised the burial in the city and did a lot in this area, about the possibility of using the city’s enterprises for cremation of corpses. Such an enterprise was found - this is the 1st brick factory of the Industry Administration building materials, located on Moskovsky highway, 8, and on March 7, 1942, the SZ of the executive committee, by decision No. 157-s, ordered the head of the Department of Building Materials Industry Comrade Vasilyev to organize the burning of corpses at the 1st brick factory, putting into operation one of the plant’s tunnel kilns to March 10, 1942 and the second by March 20, 1942 with the appropriate adaptation of trolleys for cremation of corpses. Despite the resistance of the old heat engineers, who argued that it was impossible to create the required temperatures in tunnel furnaces, the head of the department, comrade Vasilyev Nikolai Matveevich, the chief engineer of the plant, comrade Mazokhin Vasily Dmitrievich, the chief mechanic of the plant, comrade Dubrovin Serafim Alexandrovich, with a group of workers stubbornly and successfully conducted experiments and preparatory work and achieved positive results. In contrast to the crematorium designed for decades, but never built, on March 15, 1942, in Leningrad, at the indicated plant, a crematorium unprecedented in history and around the world was launched, born from the thought of people working at the front, the blockade and difficult situation in which it was then our town.
On March 16, 1942, the crematorium accepted and successfully cremated the first 150 corpses, and on March 29, it increased its throughput to 800 corpses, on April 18, 1942, it cremated 1425 corpses per day, already working on 2 furnaces. In April, a total of 22,861 corpses were cremated, in May 29,764 corpses, and a total of 109,925 were cremated up to January 1, 1943. Firewood and slate are used as fuel.
The work of the crematorium for burning corpses greatly facilitated the burial process and made it possible at the end of March to eliminate the deposits of unburied corpses in cemeteries, to bring the availability of ready-made trenches in line with the need for burying corpses entering the cemeteries, and from June 1, 1942, thanks to the successful work of the crematorium and a significant reduction in mortality, we have completely stopped the mass burial of human corpses in cemeteries, and all the corpses from hospitals, district mortuaries and other places are transported by the Funeral Business trust to the crematorium and cremated. From June 1 to the present, only individual burials are carried out in cemeteries.
The mass trench burial carried out in winter conditions with violation of sanitary rules in a number of cemeteries as the spring period approached demanded:
a) carrying out urgent work on the selection, first of all, of unburied corpses from cemeteries and the reburial of incorrectly buried ones;
b) streamlining and measuring the method of transporting corpses;
c) streamlining the work of district morgues, replacing some of the premises and adapting them all to receive corpses in the spring and summer;
d) clarification of the management structure of cemeteries, district morgues, their staffing and rates;
e) establishing accounting and paperwork for corpses entering the district morgues.

On April 14, 1942, the NW of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Working People's Deputies adopted decision No. 206-s, in which it gave specific instructions for working at city cemeteries in the spring and summer and eliminating violations committed during burial in winter conditions, suggested that the department develop and submit for approval the staffs and rates of employees of district morgues, proposed to the head of the Leningrad MPVO, Major General Lagutkin, to form a special company of 300 people to ensure the loading and unloading of corpses, their burial and the elimination of shortcomings of burial carried out in winter conditions.
Spring was approaching and the spring-summer heat was approaching. The executive committee, the administration and the Funeral Business trust understood very well that the only way to prevent the occurrence of epidemic diseases as a result of sanitary violations during burial in winter was by carrying out large and urgent work in the cemeteries of the city and in the city itself.
With the beginning of snow melting in all cemeteries (especially in Volkovskoye, Bolsheokhtinsky, Serafimovsky and Victims of January 9), many coffins with unburied corpses melted from under the snow were found. They had to be removed, cremated or buried in the existing trenches before the onset of heat and decomposition. By order of the Office No. 29 dated April 15, 1942, the manager of the Funeral Business trust was obliged:
a) from the morning of April 16, 1942, organize work in all cemeteries of the city to clean up the corpses that have melted from under the snow and ice and immediately bury them;
b) to organize these works and direct them to large cemeteries, to help the heads, attach responsible employees of the trust management and the required number of vehicles;
c) to complete the cleaning of the corpses on April 18, 1942 and at the same time to remove from the cemetery all coffins, blankets, shavings and other debris that could contribute to the emergence of epidemic diseases.
During these three days, all the employees of the trust, headed by the manager Comrade Chaikin, cemetery workers, about a thousand workers and workers of factories and plants, mobilized by the executive committees of the district councils, collected 12,900 corpses - "snowdrops", as they were then called, they were taken out of coffins , loaded onto vehicles and sent to the crematorium, and if he could not accept it, to the Piskarevskoye cemetery for burial in the prepared trenches there. The remaining coffins and other belongings of the burial were burned right there in the cemeteries at the stake. All day long bonfires blazed in the cemeteries, and solid smoke rose from them.

If at the end of December 1941, in those difficult days, the executive committee allowed the possibility of burying corpses from hospitals and hospitals according to the lists, followed by registration of deaths in the registry office, which hospitals and hospitals did not do, then from April 15, the department was strictly forbidden to the trust and cemeteries to accept corpses for burial without death certificates, this brought order to the matter of accounting for mortality.
Much in the district morgues that arose spontaneously and hastily organized in December 1941 was completely unsuitable for operation in spring and summer conditions (in the Oktyabrsky district they were delivered to the morgue at 33 Kanonerskaya St., in the Kirovsky district in the Volodarsky hospital, in Leninsky district on the 12th Krasnoarmeyskaya street - the corpses were directly piled up in the yards), they did not have approved staffing and staff rates, no forms for registering corpses were developed, no instructions, and each morgue worked in its own way and different organizations obeyed in the region.
On April 15, 1942, the administration and the trust, on the basis of paragraph 13 of the decision of the SZ executive committee of April 14, 1942 No. 206-s, were proposed by the district communal department - Leninsky, Vasileostrovsky, Frunzensky, Krasnogvardeisky, Dzerzhinsky, Volodarsky, Oktyabrsky, Sverdlovsky, Primorsky - within three days select other premises for regional morgues. The premises were selected, mostly former churches, and until May 1, 1942, they were accepted by acts by a special commission of representatives of the relevant district communal departments, the police department, the district state sanitary inspectorate and the Funeral Business trust. The following deployment of district morgues was established:
1. Vasileostrovsky - VO, 8th line, 73
2. Volodarsky - Cemetery st., 4
3. Vyborgsky - st. Batenina, d. 5
4. Dzerzhinsky - Griboyedov Canal, 2 (church)
5. Kuibyshevsky - st. Mayakovsky, 12
6. Krasnogvardeisky - Arsenalnaya st., 8
7. >> - Gunpowder, Elias Church
8. Leninsky - pr. Red Commanders (Troitsky)
9. Moscow - Smolenskaya st., 11
10. Oktyabrsky - Kanonerskaya st., 3
11. Petrogradsky - embankment. R. Karpovki, 2
12. Primorsky - Bolshaya Zelenina st., 9
13. Smolninsky - Alexander Nevsky ()
14. Sverdlovsk - (church)
15. Frunzensky - Ligovskaya st., 128 (church)
16. Kirovsky - st. Stachek, 54 (Volodarsky Hospital)

Strict sanitary control over the state of morgues has been established, and regular disinfection of the premises has been established.
By a decision of April 29, 1942, the executive committee approved the staffing levels developed by the department and the rates for employees of district morgues in the amount of 204 staff units with a monthly salary fund of 64,600 rubles.
On May 18, 1942, the Directorate approved the instructions for the work of district morgues and all forms of accounting for their work, which they had developed.
In the spring and summer, the corpses were to be taken out of the district morgues, their hospitals, hospitals and cremated immediately. The Executive Committee assigned to the Funeral Business trust 25 vehicles from the motor transport department for regular removal of corpses, ordered Major General Lagutkin to allocate one vehicle in each district to the district morgues for collecting corpses from the districts and delivering them to the district morgues.
In April 1942, a special MPVO company of 200 people was formed to load and unload corpses on transport, to carry out other urgent work in cemeteries. The company is located in a separate room. The personnel of the company and district morgues are fully equipped special clothing and footwear: impenetrable overalls, rubber boots and gloves. Soldiers of the company and employees of regional morgues receive additional bread and vodka.
Decrease in mortality, the above-listed measures, good work of the crematorium ensured:
a) streamlining the work of district morgues and the possibility for citizens and institutions that do not have the strength and means to bury the dead, hand them over to the district morgue;
b) the concentration of the removal of the dead from all over the city in one hand - in the trust "Funeral business", the daily removal of all corpses from hospitals, hospitals and district morgues to cemeteries for burial and to the crematorium for cremation, although on average 3316 were taken out per day in April corpses.

In the city, there were no longer deposits of unexported, and in the cemeteries of unburied corpses. Only in some places in the city were corpses found, the presence of which was found out by chance. So, for example, after the Hermitage was evacuated, 109 corpses were found in the cellars of its building. It was the Hermitage workers who were dying, and the administration put them in the basement and, leaving, left them without telling anyone.
In the winter of 1941/42, many individual burials were made with gross violation sanitary standards, i.e., at a depth of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 35, 40, etc. centimeters instead of 80 centimeters from the surface of the earth.
By order of the administration, in the second half of April and the first half of May 1942, at all the cemeteries of the city, their employees, under the guidance and control of employees of the trust administration, examined all the graves of individual burials in the autumn winter period 1941/42 to identify graves where the burial was made in violation of sanitary standards and subject to reburial. Based on the survey data, the order of reburials was established. The reburial of the dead was carried out by the cemetery workers and workers involved by the district councils to work in the cemeteries in the order of labor duty, by deepening the graves and lowering the deceased, and in some cases the deceased was reburied right there in the cemetery in a trench. In total, during the spring-summer period, 9173 individually buried dead were reburied in the cemeteries of the city.
The onset of spring-summer heat and the beginning of the process of decomposition of the buried dead required daily strict monitoring of individual and mass graves from the management, trust and cemetery workers, especially since a significant part of them was only slightly sprinkled with earth. The mounds of individual and mass graves began to collapse, the corpses were exposed, and a putrid smell appeared. This threatened the emergence of epidemic diseases. The management and the trust urgently put two excavators of the "Komsomolets" type to fill in the mass graves at the Piskaryovskoye cemetery, and people to the others: all the workers of the cemeteries, part personnel spetsroty MPVO and workers mobilized by the district councils. First of all, all mass graves were filled up with the formation of hills on them, during the summer the mounds on some graves settled several times, each time they were poured again. By the autumn of 1942, 17,850 individual and 584 mass graves were put in full order with the design of grave mounds. Only on 78 mass graves at the Piskaryovskoye cemetery were grave mounds not finally decorated. The backfilling of the mass grave at the Bogoslovsky cemetery (sand quarry), by decision of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of June 17, 1942 No. 309-s, was carried out by excavators of the Department of Cultural and Community Construction. The process of backfilling lasted throughout the summer, since as the corpses decomposed, the poured earth settled. In total, 15 thousand cubic meters of earth were poured onto this mass grave, and the filling is far from over. Particularly serious importance was attached to summer work at the cemetery in terms of daily monitoring of mass graves and maintaining them in order, because history does not know anything like our experience of mass graves. And therefore, individual specialists - sanitary doctors - agreed to the point that fountains of masses of decomposing bodies could clog fountains on individual mass graves. There were a lot of panicky conversations on this issue, and we, the workers of the "Funeral Business", believed that it was only necessary to prevent the exposure of corpses during the collapse of grave mounds, and the rest would go fine, and we turned out to be right. After such a mass grave, the city did not have epidemic diseases.

Having gone through a very bitter experience of the lack of spare trenches for mass burial in the winter of 1941/42, and also bearing in mind the ongoing blockade, bombardment and shelling of the city, at the request of the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council, decision SZ of June 14, 1942 No. during the summer to carry out work on digging spare mass graves. This work was mainly carried out by the 5th OSU. Now each cemetery has spare mass graves, and in total in different places there are 96 mass graves with a length of 6620 meters and a capacity for 134,120 dead.
In conclusion, it must be said that despite all the major shortcomings that occurred, caused mainly by the sudden appearance of work on burial on a scale unprecedented in history, gigantic work has been carried out.
Unfortunately, there is no organization in the city that could name exact number people who died in the city of Leningrad for the period from December 1, 1941 to June 1, 1942
This is explained by the fact that, according to inaccurate data from burials made by cemeteries, the latter in December 1941 increased by 247% compared to November, in January 1942 compared to December - by more than 408%, in February compared to January - by more than 108%.
No one was not only prepared for such dimensions of mortality and the lightning speed of its growth, but no one could ever think of anything like that.
The executive committees of the district councils workers' deputies, the headquarters of the city's MPVO with its subdivisions, some military units, and all of them were busy solving one main task - how to bury the dead and avoid their accumulation in the city and in the cemeteries unburied.
An insignificant part of the population, enterprises and institutions went to the bodies of the ZAKS for registration of deaths, since at the beginning of the increase in mortality, the registry offices also turned out to be unprepared to register such a large number of deaths - huge queues were created. In connection with this phenomenon, a further increase in mortality and a weakening of the living, the number of those wishing to register in the registry office [and] bury the deceased on their own fell, and the tossing of the dead increased, and it was impossible to register them through the registry office. It was possible to register only in cemeteries, but even here the workers were primarily occupied with burying in in large numbers coming to the cemeteries of the dead, and therefore the cemeteries, too, unfortunately, do not have an accurate record of the buried.
The scale of burial work can be judged at least by the fact that from July 1, 1941 to July 1, 1942, in addition to individual burial, 662 mass graves with a length of 20,233 linear meters were occupied for burial in the cemeteries of the city and newly allotted plots, of which excavated land in conditions of severe frosts and freezing of the soil up to one and a half meters - 160,135 cubic meters. meters, not counting the sand pit, anti-tank ditch, bomb craters at the Bogoslovsky cemetery and wolf pits at Serafimovsky.
According to the city's cemeteries, far from accurate, possibly overestimated, they buried 1,093,695 dead during the period from July 1, 1941 to July 1, 1942.

The attached diagram shows a huge increase in burials from December 1, 1941 to March 1, 1942, i.e., a short time after the introduction of a starvation food ration for the population of the city, and the same sharp decline in burials began only in April 1942, although the ration was increased at the end of December 1942. A sharp jump in the decrease in burials occurred in June 1942.
By transport of the city trust "Funeral business" and transport of other organizations, provided at the disposal of the trust from civilian hospitals, hospitals, evacuation centers, district mortuaries and others, 444,182 dead were taken out for the period from December 1, 1941 to December 1, 1942.
Upon arrival in January 1942, Comrade P. I. Chaikin, manager of the Funeral Business trust, managed to somewhat strengthen the apparatus of the trust and cemeteries. Despite all the great shortcomings in the work of the trust and cemeteries, in carrying out this gigantic work, the apparatus of the trust (under the leadership of Comrade Chaikin, his deputy Comrade Tibanov) and the cemetery workers did a very large and unprecedentedly difficult job, and individual workers, guided by the fact that they are working in the besieged front city, showed exceptional dedication in their work. For example:
1. Chief of Staff of the MPVO detachment Comrade Kalistratov, disabled (without one leg), for more than two months - December, January and February - in these very hard days blockade and work of the trust on burial selflessly, malnourished, falling asleep for 2-3 hours a day, and sometimes less, without going home, led the work of transport for the removal of the dead from the city to the cemeteries. He often worked sick, with a fever. He realized that it was impossible to leave, since there was a lot of work, and there was no one to replace him.
2. The head of the Piskarevsky cemetery, comrade Valeryanova Antonina Vladimirovna, lived in the cemetery office for more than 3 months of difficult living conditions. Up to 700 people worked at this cemetery at the same time on some days, digging trenches and burying; in February, up to 10,000 dead were brought in for burial per day. Antonina Vladimirovna was not at a loss, did not whimper, but day and night she organized and supervised the work, in severe frosts, blizzards, during the day, late in the evening and at night, she could always be seen at vigorous work in the cemetery or in the office. She actually proved herself to be a true patriot.
3. The head of the Serafimovsky cemetery, comrade Aleksey Yakovlevich Belyaevsky, came to this completely unfamiliar job on February 2, 1942, during this very difficult period of the blockade and the reversal of large-scale burial work at this cemetery, he quickly mastered the work, within more than two months he did not leaving the cemetery, living in difficult living conditions in the office, regardless of time and health, he organized and carried out a huge amount of work, put things in order at the cemetery. In spring and summer, in order to prevent epidemic diseases, he reburied 2,910 individual graves and put 199 mass graves in order.
4. Spiridonov Ivan Alekseevich - head of the burial site on the right bank of the Neva near the Vesyoly Poselok. In May 1942, being sent to this new job for him by the executive committee of the Volodarsky District Council of Workers' Deputies, he correctly realized the importance of the work entrusted to him, quickly mastered it, put together Friendly team Cemetery staff, regardless of time and effort, worked around the clock on the site and ensured uninterrupted burial. In the spring and summer, he did a lot of work on digging spare mass graves and bringing the buried mass graves into an exemplary condition.
5. Sidorov Pavel Mikhailovich - head of the Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery, a young comrade in age and experience administrative work. At this cemetery, one of the first large individual and mass burials began from the first days of December 1941. Almost all of the gravediggers fell ill, and Comrade Sidorov, having collected the remains of the cemetery workers, mostly women, correctly arranged them, correctly understood himself and conveyed to his subordinates the meaning the work carried out by the cemetery under the conditions of the blockade and, together with the team of workers, took up this work. He did a great job of burying 127 mass graves. In the spring and summer, he put all the mass graves in order, reburied 2594 individual graves. During December, January and February, almost without leaving the cemetery, he worked selflessly, regardless of time and health.

Guided high consciousness duty, in difficult conditions, regardless of severe frosts, malnutrition, the following cemetery workers worked well, giving all their strength:
At the Volkov cemetery
1. Kuzmina Anna Vasilievna
2. Lobanova Matrena Matveevna
3. Fedorova Maria Ivanovna
4. Kudryavtseva Pelageya Dmitrievna
5. Danilenko Sergey Semyonovich
6. Shishov Mikhail Nikitich
Bolsheokhtinsky cemetery
1. Alekseev Andrey Alekseevich
2. Goryacheva Feodosia Kharitonovna
3. Egorova Ekaterina Ivanovna
4. Khmelinskaya Claudia Kuzminichna
5. Alekseeva Elena Nikitichna
Tov. Efimov worked until he was completely exhausted and, despite the lack of strength, went to work until last day life. On the last day of his life, he was at work, went home and, before reaching the apartment, died on the stairs of his house.
At the Theological Cemetery
1. Melenkova Maria Ivanovna
2. Samsonova Xenia Nikiforovna
3. Pavel Aleksandrovich Melenkov
4. Andryushov Alexey Alekseevich
5. Buzhinsky Viktor Ivanovich - worked until complete loss of strength and exhaustion, as a result of which he died.
Serafimovsky cemetery
1. Filatova Natalya Vasilievna
2. Tatyana Timofeeva
3. Lavrova Fekla Isaevna
4. Petukhova Maria Alekseevna

Individual cemetery workers, given the importance and urgency of the work being done, worked to the last of their strength. Some gravediggers, having dug out the grave with incredible effort, were unable to get out of it without outside help, or, lowering the deceased into the grave, fell after him themselves.
There were cases when the gravediggers of the Volkov cemetery Zuev, Novikov, Mitkin, Dmitriev and Kovshov died at the cemetery, at work. One of them dug a grave, lay down at the bottom to rest and did not get up again - he died.
All this shows that the cemetery workers, despite the difficulties, considered it their duty to their homeland to give all their strength and life for the work entrusted to them.
But the scale of the work was such that some employees of the cemeteries and the apparatus of the trust, without the help of the executive committees of the district councils, the headquarters of the MPVO, military units and construction organizations could not be carried out. The executive committees of the district councils of Krasnogvardeisky, Moscow, Vasileostrovsky, Volodarsky and Primorsky played a significant role in streamlining the work of removing the dead from the city and their burial. They took direct control of the work of the cemeteries and daily helped them with manpower, tools and transport.
A lot of work on the removal of the dead from the city to cemeteries, digging mass graves and burial was carried out by units of the MPVO under the leadership of [chief] MPVO Major General Lagutkin and Chief of Staff Major Tregubov.
Of the total very large number of personnel of the MPVO units, the good work of the following comrades should be especially noted:
1. Tipkin Georgy Ivanovich - head of the degassing team of the MPVO site. During the winter of 1941/42, he worked all the time digging trenches in difficult conditions in frost of -30-35 "C. He completed the work on time, for which he has gratitude from the head of the MPVO of the city of Leningrad.
2. Zuev Vasily Dmitrievich - a fighter of the precinct formation of the MPVO. Throughout the winter of 1941/42, he worked on earthworks for digging trenches, fulfilling the norms by 150-200%. Disciplined, dedicated fighter.
3. Petrov Nikolay Yakovlevich and
4. Alekseev Alexander Grigoryevich - chiefs of staff of the Primorsky District Air Defense Forces - disciplined, energetic, strong-willed commanders. During the entire winter period of 1941/42, the formations of the MPVO worked on digging trenches under their direct supervision. As a result, the district coped well with the assigned tasks.
5. Ustyantsev Ivan Nikolaevich - chief of staff of the MPVO of the Krasnogvardeisky district. During the winter of 1941/42, the MPVO formations worked on earthworks to dig trenches under his leadership and with his direct participation. The area has done well assigned jobs.
6. Medvedeva Maria Afanasievna - commander of the demolition platoon of the 1st company of the headquarters of the Leningrad Air Defense Forces. During the winter of 1941/42, she worked in earthworks, digging trenches. Tov. Medvedeva clearly and quickly carried out the tasks of the command, showed an example of courage to the soldiers of her platoon.
In incredibly difficult conditions During the year of the war and blockade, the workers of the city cemeteries, with the great help of the executive committees of the district Soviets of working people's deputies, units of the MPVO and construction organizations, carried out gigantic, unprecedented work on burial during the year of the war and blockade.
The result of the work was good - the city and its population, having experienced unprecedented hardships, after such a mass burial in violation of sanitary standards, avoided epidemic diseases.
Head of the UPKO of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of Workers' Deputies A. Karpushenko
TsGA St. Petersburg, fund 2076, op. 4, d. 63, l. 147-191.

The cemetery has existed since the early 1870s. In the 1920s - 1940s, the executed and dead in Leningrad prisons were secretly buried here. There were no markings on the burial sites. The burials became known from eyewitness accounts. Total population buried is not established, individual names are known.

Park of Culture and Leisure named after Yuri Gagarin is a park of culture and recreation in the city of Samara. Opened July 9, 1976. On the site of the Yura Gagarin Park, there used to be dachas that belonged to the NKVD. This was still in the distant 30s, when political repressions were just beginning.

Butovo landfill- the historical name of the tract, known as one of the places mass executions and burials of the victims Stalinist repressions near the village of Drozhzhino Leninsky district Moscow region, where, according to the results of research of archival and investigative documents, tens of thousands of people were shot in the 1930s-1950s. 20 thousand 762 people who were shot in August 1937 - October 1938 are known by name.

Contrary to the modern insane apologists for Stalinism, the victims of the mass repressions of the 30s were not only the top of the Bolshevik elite, but also millions of absolutely apolitical fellow citizens, whose lives turned into those very Stalinist chips that rotted not only in the logging sites of the GULAG, described in detail by Solzhenitsyn, but also in places of mass terror at the place of residence. In every regional center of that time, at least thousands of people were victims of unprecedented state repressions. For the execution of death sentences and hasty burials, remote places on the outskirts of cities were specially assigned away from human eyes. However, it was absolutely impossible to completely hide these "secret objects", because the scale of the ongoing terror against the civilian population exceeded all conceivable boundaries.

Who were these people who were so cruelly dealt with? The photographs clearly show the bullet holes on the skulls. They were often shot in the back of the head and after that opposite part skull gaped with a terrible torn hole. Many residents of the city, especially young people, no longer know that there were mass shootings and burials. There is practically no information about this anywhere, or it is in limited access.

We found her in 1988. But at first they did not give permission to visit her. At the last meeting of our commission, General Kurkov said: "Yes, you have found what you were looking for." And after the meeting, we went there for the first time, they gave us a bus, the members of the commission went to Levashovo. And when the gate was opened, and we went in, it was a terrible state. And with me was General Bleer, he was also a member of the commission. And I say: "What, is it here?" He: “Yes, it is here. Your father is here." Here is my state: after 50 years, I saw, found out where he was buried, where I can bring candles, flowers, and so on.

"Time will pass. The graves of the hated traitors will be overgrown with weeds and thistles, covered with the eternal contempt of honest Soviet people Andrey Vyshinsky, the public prosecutor, said at the trial of the anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc in 1938. This is how he saw the future of the graves where the victims of terror lie. To the shame of his contemporaries, his words turned out to be prophetic in many ways. the situation has changed in better side- hundreds of thousands of victims have been rehabilitated, books of memory and studies of historians on the problems of mass repressions are being published in Moscow and in the regions, the Memorial society and the public center "Peace, Progress, Human Rights" named after Andrei Sakharov have been created, commissions are operating to restore the rights of the rehabilitated, - the graves of the repressed are still covered with weeds and thistles, and they are trying to restrict access to them.

The two largest mass graves of victims of political repression in Moscow are the Butovo and Kommunarka special facilities of the NKVD (for an article about the Butovo test site, see Itogi, November 2, 1999). Kommunarka is located on the 24th kilometer Kaluga highway. Only after more than sixty years did it become possible to open it to the public.

"Giving Berries to the Chekists"

The name of the special facility was borrowed from the neighboring state farm "Kommunarka" (former subsidiary farm OGPU), although the inhabitants of the surrounding villages call him "Vine". Perhaps the place is named after one of the owners of the estate, which was located here before the revolution. Sources testify that there used to be a Khoroshavka manor on the site of the special facility (a manor is a manor, which, unlike an ordinary estate, does not bring income to the owner and is intended for recreation and entertainment). Khoroshavka is mentioned in archival records of the 17th century; it was sold many times, given away, passed down by inheritance. In one of the books of the beginning of the century it is said that the manor was located "in a birch grove with a pond formed from the dammed river Ordynka" - this grove later became a mass grave site.

In the first post-revolutionary decades, the manor stood empty, the owners were evicted from there. According to the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia, in the late 1920s and early 1930s (the exact date is unknown), the territory was allocated for the construction of a personal dacha for the chairman of the OGPU, later People's Commissar of the NKVD of the USSR G. Yagoda. A new house was built on the site of the former manor. locals they recall that the dacha was guarded very strictly - it was not allowed to graze cattle nearby, pick mushrooms, and even more so to approach the fence. Yagoda's niece V. Znamenskaya, in unpublished memoirs, says that the dacha was not intended for recreation and family meetings; it was the country residence of the people's commissar, where he held meetings with the leaders of the NKVD.

In April 1937, Yagoda was arrested, confiscated things were taken from the dacha, and for some time she remained ownerless. In the working notes of Yagoda Yezhov's successor, there is a laconic line: "I give Yagoda to the Chekists." By that time one firing range- Butovo - already worked in full force. But in 1937, the daily number of those shot began to number not in the tens, but in the hundreds, and it was necessary to open a new burial place.

The so-called hit lists, compiled in the Central Archive of the FSB of the Russian Federation based on archival and investigative files of victims of political repressions, contain more than four and a half thousand names (according to preliminary data, at least 6 thousand people were buried in Kommunarka). The main part of the executions - more than three and a half thousand - occurred in 1937, about a thousand were executed in 1938, in 1939 and during the war years. In the following decades, they were all found not guilty and rehabilitated posthumously. On the title pages of the execution lists, it is said that the burial places of the executed are "territories in the village of Butovo or the Kommunarka state farm."

It is very difficult to establish the exact place of burial - this is due to the incompleteness of archival documents that accompanied the execution of the sentence. There is reason to believe that, according to the plan of the organizers of the Great Terror, it was in Kommunarka that the bodies of especially responsible workers of the party and the state should have been buried, although this is not reported in any source. It was they who "passed" through central office NKVD and through the most mobile terror " Judicial authority" - military collegium Supreme Court of the USSR. However, in addition to high-ranking, Kommunarka also included simple people. The lists include a handicraft shoemaker, a housewife, a carpenter in a metal toy factory, a general store agent, a policeman, a postman, etc. In addition to various "operational" considerations of the Chekists, this is explained by the fact that the central apparatus helped to "unload" Moscow administration The NKVD took over "ordinary" affairs.

Covert and overt

In the land of "Kommunarka" - the ashes of members and candidate members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks: A. Bubnov, N. Bukharin, A. Rykov, Y. Rudzutak, N. Krestinsky; First Secretaries of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks union republics; members of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, members of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, more than twenty secretaries of the regional party committees, chairmen of the governments of the Union and autonomous republics, executive committees of regions and cities, founders and leaders of the Comintern (O. Pyatnitsky, Ya. Berzin, Bela Kun). "Kommunarka" has also become the main "general's" cemetery: many commanders of military districts and fleets (P. Dybenko, N. Kuibyshev, G. Kireev and others) are buried here. The lists associated with Kommunarka contain more than two hundred names of NKVD officers who were shot in Moscow. Two of the brightest writers ended their journey in Kommunarka Soviet era- Boris Pilnyak and A. Vesely, scientist and poet A. Gastev, historian and literary critic D. Shakhovskoy, academic microbiologist G. Nadson, chief editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta, Krasnaya Zvezda, Trud, Ogonyok magazine.

The mass graves of the victims of political terror were one of the most heavily guarded state secrets. In the past, only a few state security officers knew about them. Security guards of special facilities did not always know what they were guarding. In the years following the mass repressions, a special position was introduced in the MGB-KGB as curators of execution facilities. As a rule, these proxies were in the rank of colonel, and their task was to ensure the safety of the territory and keep outsiders out. In Kommunarka, the settled pits were filled up, for which 50 earth trucks were brought here in the 70s.

Now the secret veils have been removed, but the historical reality does not open immediately. The collected information about the past of "Kommunarka" was first published in the newspaper of the "Memorial" society "October 30". Oral testimonies of many residents of the surrounding villages and towns are recorded. Historian Arseniy Roginsky studied in detail the so-called shooting documents stored in the 7th fund of the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia. The results of this study formed the basis for the concept of the recently published Book of Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions "Shoot Lists. Moscow, 1937 - 1941. Kommunarka, Butovo".

The first, incomplete, survey of one of the mass grave sites in Kommunarka was carried out - the pits were counted, their measurements were made, searches were made for traces of bullets on the trees, and access roads to the pits were determined. According to the pieces of barbed wire preserved on the trees, the execution zone was determined: after the last check, the condemned were brought here and shot at the edge of the pit.

The question of the future of the declassified special facilities, of the creation of memorials of memory there, arose before the public in the early 1990s. The Moscow government allocated money for the creation of projects for memorials to victims of repression at the Butovo training ground and in Kommunarka. It was believed that the people's commissar's dacha, burial places and the entire territory should become a single museum complex. However, the projects were never implemented, and years later the Russian government decided to transfer the special facility - out of sight - to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1999, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov signed a corresponding decree.

The Patriarchate handed over the former special facility to St. Catherine's Monastery. "Kommunarka" became his farmstead, now several monks and hieromonks live in Yagoda's house. The experience of the Butovo test site, which was also handed over to the church, showed that the church community does not perpetuate memory and does not care about burials. The latest history of the St. Catherine's Monastery does not give hope that the memory of the executed will be immortalized: one of the most terrible NKVD torture prisons was located on the territory of this monastery in Vidnoye, but the memory of the dead was not immortalized there.

In the meantime, access to Kommunarka is limited. In order to get there, you need to get a special permit from the monastery. For example, the Kultura TV channel was never allowed to shoot there.

Leonid Novak - Researcher and educational center"Memorial"

The Stalin era was marked mass repression so-called "enemies of the people". Many of them were sentenced to be shot. As a rule, relatives in these cases were informed that the person was sentenced to "ten years without the right to correspond." The executed were buried in common graves. Such burials had the status of special objects. detailed information about them appeared only in recent decades.

Kommunarka

In the 1920s, a number of state farms and facilities under the jurisdiction of security agencies appeared in the Leninsky district of the Moscow region. One of them was located in the village of Kommunarka, on the territory where before the revolution there was a manor house, and later - the summer residence of the head of the Stalinist state security service, Heinrich Yagoda.

The special object was a plot of 20 hectares, surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire. Beginning in 1937, the bodies of those executed in the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, Butyrka and Sukhanovskaya prisons were brought here at night. There were rumors that an underground tunnel had been specially dug from the Sukhanovka remand prison to Kommunarka in order to secretly deliver the corpses to the special zone. According to one version, initially in Kommunarka it was supposed to bury those members of the OGPU who fell into the execution lists. By the way, Yagoda himself was among them. But later, the territory was adapted for the burial of other "enemies of the people", who were executed in Moscow prisons according to the sentences of the "troikas".

According to the FSB, about 10-14 thousand convicts are buried here, but the names of most of them are unknown, only about 5 thousand people were identified. Among them are writers Boris Pilnyak, Artem Vesely, Bruno Yasensky, members of the Mongolian government, leaders of the Comintern…

Butovo

Unlike Kommunarka, where mostly representatives of the "elite" were buried, the Butovo landfill near the village of Butovo near Moscow, organized on the site of the former landowner's estate Drozhzhino and operating since 1935, was originally intended for mere mortals. Most of all, peasants from the surrounding villages near Moscow were buried here, often arrested on far-fetched reasons, under the article “Counter-revolutionary agitation”. Sometimes whole families were shot in order to fulfill the terrible “order-order plan”. Among the buried were also workers, employees and prisoners of Dmitlag (about a third of total number): scientists, clergymen, sectarians, recidivist thieves. Another category is the disabled. Because the blind, deaf, and crippled were seldom capable of physical labor, which means that they would have to spend the prison gruel in vain, after a formal medical examination they were simply sentenced to "the death penalty."

According to documentary sources, it was established that from August 1937 to October 19, 1938, 20,765 executions were committed on the territory of Butovo alone.

Levashovskaya wasteland

Today it is a memorial cemetery in the vicinity of St. Petersburg. From August 1937 to 1954, it was a special facility where mass burials of the executed were carried out: Leningraders, Novgorodians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and even foreigners - Poles, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Italians. In total, about 45 thousand people were buried in Levashovo during this period.

Today, here you can see monuments to the repressed of each individual nationality. And also - monuments to representatives of various religious denominations and even repressed deaf and dumb. The most famous objects of the memorial are the monument "Moloch of totalitarianism" and the "Bell of Remembrance".

Sandarmokh

This forest tract is located 20 kilometers from the Karelian town of Povenets. On this territory, those who were shot in 1934-1939 were buried. Their corpses were thrown into pits. In total, 236 such pits were subsequently discovered. It is estimated that about 3.5 thousand residents of Karelia, more than 4.5 thousand Belbaltlag prisoners and 1111 prisoners of the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp were buried in Sandarmokh.

brewer

In the forest tract near the village of Pivovarikha near Irkutsk, in the early 1930s, the Pervoe Maya state farm subordinate to the Irkutsk UNKVD was organized. Dachas of UNKVD officers and a pioneer camp for their children were placed nearby. In 1937, a special zone was set up inside the state farm territory, where they began to bury the residents of Irkutsk and its environs, who had been shot according to the sentences of the “troikas”. Sentences were usually carried out in Irkutsk, in the basements of the UNKVD department on the street. Litvinova, 13, as well as in the internal prison of the NKVD (St. Barrikad, 63). At night, the corpses were taken out on trucks to Pivovarikha.