Ratovo is a village located in the Sechenovsky district. According to local historian Gennady Mikhailovich Malanetsky, it was founded around 1371 when monks from the Nizhny Novgorod Pechersky Monastery arrived here. Initially, the village was called Rataevka, probably in honor of the first settler or owner. After the Kazan campaign of 1552, Ivan the Terrible transferred these lands to the three Burtsov brothers. During Pugachev's uprising, one of the Burtsovs was executed in Alatyr, and his estate in Ratovo was burned down. After that, the landlords moved to the outskirts of the village, to a place known as Burtsovka or 'the farmstead.' Later, Ratovo passed into the possession of the Durassovs, connected with N.A. Motovilov, the biographer of St. Seraphim of Sarov. The last owners of the 'farmstead' were the Petrovich family, from whom part of the estate, a wooden wing on a stone foundation, remains.

According to the 'State Lists of Historical and Cultural Monuments of the Nizhny Novgorod Region,' the village has a monument of urban planning and architecture, the Ascension Church, dated to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The document for its state protection has the number 286. According to historian Vladimir Bakunin, the stone temple was built in 1785 by landlord Mikhail Yakovlevich Burtsov. The church has three altars: the main, cold one, dedicated to the Ascension of the Lord, and in the warm chapels, the right one is dedicated to St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, and the left one to St. Euphemia the All-Praised.