In 1935-1939 there was a secret site, the NKVD “dacha”, where the Gagarin park now stands. At the end of the 1930s the executed inhabitants of the Kuibyshev Region, including those shot during the Great Terror, were buried there. The numbers are not known: researchers estimate that there were between 2,500 and 3,500 bodies.

On 30 October 1989 a memorial to the victims of political repression was erected in the park. It took the form of a granite cube on a plinth bearing two inscriptions: “This is where the victims of repression in the 1930s and 1940s were buried” and “Let us bow our heads in memory of the slain innocents”. In 2012 the memorial was replaced on the initiative of the Samara city authorities by the “Saviour” sculptural composition (artist I.I. Melnikov). The new memorial was triumphantly unveiled on 30 October 2012. It depicts a bronze figure with a crown of thorns on his head that is transformed into barbed wire. The figure sits on a dark red granite plinth on which the following words have been etched: “To the victims of political repression in the 1930s and 1940s”. On either side of the memorial are six granite pillars on which various texts, including Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, have been inscribed.