In 1931// the Transfiguration (Preobrazhenskoe) Graveyard, in existence since the early 1870s, was renamed the “9 January graveyard” by the Bolshevik government. A monument to  those shot during the protest on Bloody Sunday, 9 (22) January 1905, was unveiled at the cemetery where many of the dead protestors had been openly buried. In the 1920s to 1940s, meanwhile, the bodies of those who died or were shot in Leningrad’s prisons, especially during the Great Terror, were secretly interred there. No grave-markers distinguished the places they were buried: these became known thanks to the testimony of eyewitnesses.

The total numbers executed and reburied there have not been established; only individual names are known. In 2001, Memorial in St Petersburg successfully proposed that a monument dedicated to “The Victims of Political Repression” be added to the cemetery.