Among the places in Tomsk where those executed were buried in the 1920s-1940s were the ravines on Mount Kashtak. Historian B.P. Trenin has evidence that almost all those shot in the city during the Great Terror (1937-1938; a total of some 9,000 people) were buried there. In 1951 the old city cemetery was shut down and new buildings of the Sibkabel factory followed by apartment blocks were built there.

In the 1950s to 1970s the majority of burials were destroyed as the area was cleared for construction. The builders repeatedly came across human remains and disposed of them on the instructions of the Tomsk Region KGB. In 1989 members of the Tomsk Memorial Society carried out a test excavation in part of a ravine on Mount Kashtak. In 1995 they passed to the Tomsk prosecutor’s office the most recent remains tossed aside by the builders. Forensic examination confirmed that they belonged to the bodies of people shot in the latter half of the 1930s. The prosecutor gave his approval for their reburial in 2002 and on 20 December that year they were buried in a common grave in the Baktin cemetery [70-01].

In 2001 the city authorities decided to create a memorial complex on the southern tip of Mount Kashtak. A 9-metres-high commemorative cross on a granite pedestal (designed by O. Leshchiner) was unveiled and consecrated on 9 February 2003. A granite plaque at its foot reads, “May the unjustly slain be remembered forever”. In 2011 work began on the Tomsk Golgotha church complex on Mount Kashtak.

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On 17 December 2017 Metropolitan Rostislav of Tomsk and Asinovo consecrated the temporary wooden church of Russia’s New Martyrs and Confessors which forms part of the complex.