In the early 1960s, the remains of prisoners from the town’s prison, shot during the Great Terror, were found during construction work in Bobrov. In the 1930s the building housed the district departments of the OGPU-NKVD and executions were carried out there: now it was due for demolition. A decision was taken to secretly transfer the remains to the sand quarries near Lushnikovka, today within the town limits, and there they were deposited in a trench. There is evidence that the road from Bobrov to Khrenovoe village was later routed across this trench.

In the 1990s, longstanding inhabitants of Luzhnikovka pointed out the presumed site of the reinterred remains. In 2001 (some sources say 2002) a memorial “To the Victims of Political Repression” was placed there. No archaeological investigation was carried out and the plot of land has no legal status. Subsequently a graveyard developed alongside the burial site. Children of those shot in the 1930s who, for decades, had not known where their parents’ bodies lay, now wanted to be buried alongside them.

How many were then shot in Bobrov Prison is uncertain. According to lists, provided in the early 2000s by the Voronezh Region Prosecutor’s Office, 500 were executed at the prison during the Great Terror in 1937-1938, of whom 140 were inhabitants of the Bobrov district. The peak came early in 1938 when 50 were shot in a single day (14 February). The lists of those executed were published in the Kommuna newspaper in the 2000s.