From 1933 to 1953 an NKVD labour camp and prison were located in Sviyazhsk; from 1936 onwards the camp was demoted to the status of a corrective-labour colony. Those who died in the camp or were shot in the prison were buried in the town and on Tatarikh island, to the south. Their exact numbers are unknown.

In 1956 when the Kuibyshev reservoir was created the burial site was flooded. When the water fell to a low level in 1995 one of the sites where prisoners were buried in Sviyazhsk was discovered. Part of the remains (95 bodies) were reburied, with the support of the island’s administration, in the grounds of the Monastery of the Assumption in Sviyazhsk by a team of students from the Kazan teacher training college. That same year a memorial was raised over the burial, a concrete pillar with the inscription: “Here lie the remains of 95 people slain in the years of repression”. In September 2010 when telephone wires were being laid outside the west wall of the monastery another mass burial was uncovered. It is thought to date back to the 1940s.

The Sviyazhsk administration decided not to carry out an exhumation but to move the 1995 reburial to the monastery and create a memorial area there. The ceremonial transfer took pace in September 2011 and a service of thanks and intercession was celebrated. The first monument was dismantled and on 30 October the same year a new memorial was unveiled at the site of reburial. Funded by the Tatarstan budget and investors, the new monument is a two-metre-high pillar of white marble (sculptor M. Gasimov) in which a barred window and a hand releasing a dove have been inserted. The inscription reads “To the victims of political repression” in both Russian and Tatar. Staff at the “Island-Town of Sviyazhsk” Museum are working to compile a list of the prisoners who died in the town.