Numerous witness accounts by the city’s old inhabitants state that in the 1930s executions and burials took place in the old cemetery of Kuibyshev (known before 1935 as Kainsk). Historian A.G. Teplyakov has information that people were also shot in the district NKVD building. Internal documentation of the Kuibyshev NKVD operational department confirms that about two thousand people were sentenced to death during the Great Terror (1937-1938), by suffocation or by being shot.

In 1990 the Commission for the Erection of a Memorial to the Victims of Stalinist Repression determined the location of the site of mass burial in the old city cemetery. On 30 October 1994 a memorial (designer P.V. Martynenko) was placed in the cemetery with the inscription, “To our fellow citizens, victims of repression”. In 2010 the city administration paid for the now dilapidated monument to be replaced by copy of the old design with a new inscription: “Dedicated to the victims of political repression, living and deceased. Here lie the remains of our fellow citizens, shot in the 1930s in Kuibyshev”.

In 2016 the inhabitants of the city planted oak and rowan saplings to form an Avenue of Remembrance next to the memorial as part of the “Relay of Memory and Duty” event.