Between late 1771 and 1772, Catherine the Great, empress of the Russian Empire, issued an edict which decreed that, from that point on, any person who died (regardless of social standing or class origins) no longer had the right to be buried within church crypts or adjacent churchyards.

However, the true deciding factor which led to the new laws being enforced on such a mass scale across the entire Russian empire was to avoid further outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, especially the black plague which had led to the Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771.

The first person to be buried in this cemetery was Johann Gebhard Brethfeld, a merchant in Saint Petersburg.

The person who has done the most work in investigating the history of the cemetery is Dr. Benedikt Böhm in Saint Petersburg.

As of 2007, Dr. Böhm and published four volumes on the history of the cemetery, each of which contain extensive lists of names of those people who were buried there between 1773 and 1936.