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 their social standing or class origins), no longer had the right to be buried within church crypts or adjacent churchyards.

This older cemetery was located near German Quarter (on the opposite bank of Yauza River), which had traditionally served the Lutheran community and other Western Christian denominations.

Most graves, however, are plain headstones or crosses; traditional Russian sarcophagus-styled tombs of this period are rare and usually belong to Orthodox dead, originally buried elsewhere and relocated to Vvedenskoe later.

During World War II, many soldiers who died in the nearby Lefortovo hospitals were buried here including 50 Heroes of the Soviet Union among whom was Stepan Kretov (1919–1975), and the deceased French pilots from the Normandie-Niemen regiment.

In some instances, like the Pikersgills descending from Englishman John Pickersgill of Howgrave in Yorkshire (1765–1841), original lots were too small to accommodate future generations, and were eventually re-established on different sites.