[1] After the Russian Revolution, scores of Soviet soldiers killed during the Battle of Moscow and people executed by NKVD were secretly buried at the Donskoy Cemetery.

It is believed that the Mass graves from the era contain the remains of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Pyotr Krasnov, Vsevolod Meyerhold,[1] Isaac Babel, and other victims of Stalin's regime.

The remains of painter Valentin Serov, composer Sergei Taneyev, and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky were exhumed and transferred to the more prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery.

In 1930, Stalinist authorities dug a large pit in the east portion of the cemetery to act as a Mass grave for the cremated ashes of executed political prisoners from Joseph Stalin's Great Purge; the site was intentionally chosen for its isolation from normal burial sites due to its "shameful" history as Eastern Orthodox consecrated ground during the Tsarist era, which the Soviets had revoked as part of state atheism in the USSR.

The ashes of numerous executed prisoners, both common and high-ranking—including notorious figures such as Nikolai Yezhov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Pavel Alexandrovich Alexandrov etc.