Between 13 and 15 January 1919, without investigation or trial, a squad from the Cheka shot the inhabitants of two Tatar villages, Semyonovka (Semenovka) and Poshatovo, for protesting against the mass requisition of their grain and livestock. The exact number executed is not known but researchers suggest there were no less than 53 victims, seven of them mullahs. Their bodies were buried in a common grave in clearing between the two villages. In the 1920s, the villagers began to bury their dead  there as well.

The Tatar population of the Nizhny Novgorod Region kept the memory of the events of 1919 alive in oral tradition as “the Soviet regime’s violence against ordinary working people” and “persecution of the Tatars and their mullahs for their Islamic faith”. The victims were equated with martyrs for their beliefs and their grave became a place of religious pilgrimage. In the following decades the inhabitants of Semyonovka looked after the site.

On 19 June 1999, a marble pillar with the names of 50 of those executed was erected over their common grave. Shamil Sabitov, born in Semyonovka but resident in St Petersburg, paid for the monument. On 27 July 2004, a memorial complex in memory of the slain was opened next to the entrance into the graveyard, funded by a donation from Faiz Gilmanov.