In 1937-1938, as part of the Great Terror, the Slavgorod district section of the NKVD executed inhabitants of the Slavgorod, Nemetsky (German) and other neighbouring districts who had been sentenced to death by the extrajudicial troika. For this purpose they used land near Bolsheromanovka village that was under the control of the NKVD. The site of these executions was thoroughly concealed, and the area was fenced off and guarded. 644 people were shot there and buried in 14 common graves, the largest of which contained 210 bodies. These burials were scattered chaotically across the entire field. In the 1960s the field was ploughed up and sown with crops.

In July 1997, using archival documents a group of pupils from the Bolsheromanovka and Lebedinskaya schools investigated the area of the burials and erected a memorial to the victims of political repression. (They were led by N.V. Chaika, director of the Bolsheromanovka middle school.) The memorial took the form of six aluminium tubes, decreasing in height, that represent the six decades during which this terrible secret remained concealed. A marble plaque bears the inscription, “To the victims of political repression, in memory and in sorrow, 1937-1938”.

In 2001 the tubes were stolen in an act of vandalism. The memorial was restored in 2004.