During the Great Terror those shot or who died during interrogation at city prison No 1 in Ryazan were secretly buried in the wasteland next to the wall around the Lazarevskoe cemetery. The burials were carried out at night and the bodies were interred in trenches: according to eyewitness accounts, there were no less than ten trenches in the plot of land. The wasteland was 400 square metres in area and until the late 1950s it was fenced off and guarded.

The mass burials were discovered during building work in 1993. As a result of protests by Ryazan Memorial Society and the city’s residents the work was halted, and the remains of two hundred people displaying signs of a violent death were exhumed from two of the trenches. The rest of the land was not studied and building work resumed. In 1993, thanks to the efforts of Ryazan Memorial the remains were reburied in a common grave at the Memorial Complex for the Victims of War and Repression [62-05] which was then under construction. The site is included in the educational tour, “Ryazan: The Topography of Terror”.