According to old residents, prisoners who died in Perm’s NKVD Prison No. 1 in the 1930s and 1940s were buried on the western slope of the historic Yegoshikhinskoe cemetery. There are reports that during the Great Terror the bodies of those shot in the prison were also buried there. Pre-1938 the Perm Region formed part of the Urals Region; the capital was then Sverdlovsk, and it was there that most mass executions took place in 1937-1938. Oral testimony of former NKVD employees indicates that some executions took place in Perm, in NKVD Prison No. 1, and the bodies were buried in the Yegoshikhinskoe cemetery. No documentary confirmation of either has been found. According to the Perm Region ministry for Culture, Youth and Mass Communication documents concerning executions and subsequent burial in Perm are held in the archive of the regional MVD’s Information Centre. The cemetery was closed to further burial in 1962.

On 30 October 1996, thanks to the efforts of Perm Memorial Society a monument (designer, M.I. Futlik) to the Victims of Political Repression was unveiled at the cemetery. It was dedicated to the deceased inmates of the Gulag, forced settlers and victims of the Great Terror. The main source of funding for the preparation and erection of the memorial were personal donations made by members of the Perm Memorial Society, inhabitants of the city, contributions by the workforce at various enterprises, organisations and firms and also donations by the regional, city, and district administration.

The memorial is a belltower 6.3 metres high. Five concrete supports are crowned with barbed wire brought from the camps in the Perm Region and support a five-pointed star. The inscriptions on the two bronze plaques read: “In memory of the Victims of Political Repression” and, a quotation from Anatoly Zhigulin: “O people! You bore numbers on your backs, but you were not slaves. You were above and more stubborn than your tragic fate”. Nowadays the monument in the Yegoshikhinskoe cemetery is the principal memorial to the Victims of Political Repression in the region. Every year on 30 October, the Day in Commemoration of the Victims of Political Repression, solemn events take place there.

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In 2016 and 2017 rallies were held at the monument on 27 February in memory of Boris Nemtsov, assassinated in Moscow on that day in 2015.

At present the memorial is in need of repair but since it is not on the books of the city there are no formal grounds for Perm to pay for the work out of its budget. The Perm Memorial Society regularly holds workdays at which young volunteers, together with the children and grandchildren of those arrested and deported, care for the territory.

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Regional officials laid flowers and wreaths at the memorial on 30 October 2022 but saw “no need for a public gathering”, writes the Centre for Historical Memory (formerly the Perm Region Memorial Society). Relatives and supporters gathered later unofficially at the site.