In 1930 thousands of families of dekulakized Siberian peasants were forcibly resettled in the Kulai clearing among the Vasyugan marshes. They were deported as “second-category” kulaks in response to the secret 1 January 1930 resolution of the Communist Party Politburo.

The first group to arrive in March 1930 numbered 8,891, according to the documents of the Kulai commandant’s office: the office then was responsible for 22 settlements. Mortality among the settlers was high during the 1930s and they were buried in the forest near to the settlement to which they were attached. The numbers of men, women and children buried there have not been established; name lists are not available. The regime limiting the settlers’ movements was lifted in 1947 and after the last inhabitants left the settlement in the 1960s the cemetery was abandoned.

The first commemorative sign in Nizhny Kulai was put up in August 1990 by a youth expedition from Omsk: a simple board fixed to a tree, it read “To the innocent victims of Stalinist repression”. In 2000, an archaeological team found traces of settlements and crosses in the graveyards and made a topographic map of the area. In August 2004, during a pilgrimage organised by the Omsk-Tara Diocese, Father Anatoly (Ledenev) from the village of Vassis in the Tara district discovered a churchyard in woodland with five surviving crosses. Three bore barely distinguishable inscriptions: those buried in the cemetery had died between 1939 and 1964. In August 2008 Father Anatoly erected a commemorative cross there.