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Here in the months from August 1937 through October 1938 more than 20,000 presumed enemies of the Soviet state were shot and buried during the worst of the Stalinist purges of the 1930's. At that time, much of Butovo was a military reservation closed to the public. Some one thousand of the victims are believed to have died for their faith – bishops, priests, deacons, monks, nuns and numerous Orthodox faithful along with old Bolsheviks, monarchists, Trotskyite rightists, arch-reactionaries, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, Jewish Zionist cosmopolites, German communist refugees from Nazi Germany, kulaks, revisionists, social misfits, and various others caught up in the final Stalinist frenzy of extermination before the onset of World War II – all buried together – saints and sinners – in common graves on which the earth was piled in mounds which remain to the present - to await the sundering of the sheep from the goats on the Last Day.
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