The construction of the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors of Arkhangelsk began in 2007 with the blessing of Bishop Tikhon of Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory and was completed in 2015. The location for the church was chosen deliberately, as it is meant to bless all who embark on long journeys.

Previously, this site was one of the mass execution locations in Arkhangelsk, known as the "Mhi" swamp, and is now the "Privokzalny" microdistrict.

In 1987, journalist Alexey Sukhanovsky organized a scout team called "In the Name of the Fallen," which initiated the search movement in the Arkhangelsk region. He focused on finding those who perished in the Great Patriotic War and studying the intervention of the Entente countries in the North in 1918-1919, which he referred to as a "full-scale war." It was during this time that the first mass executions occurred in Arkhangelsk.

At that time, the Red Army occupied Arkhangelsk and conducted a "cleansing" of the prisons. About two thousand prominent citizens who supported the previous regime were taken hostage: merchants, officials, priests, and figures from science and culture, along with their families. Every tenth person was executed, as mentioned in the monographs of the well-known Arkhangelsk historian Evgeny Ovsyankin.

Human bones were found in the Mhi swamp immediately after the Civil War, but as the Privokzalny district began to develop, it became impossible to ignore the clusters of skulls with bullet holes in the back. Since 1980, the regional KGB administration likely took this issue under control. A particularly large burial site was discovered at the end of 1989 during the repair of a sewage collector on Gaidar Street. Searchers took charge of the situation. According to them and the head of the cultural and educational society "Nord," Sergey Klochev, most of the remains belonged to the victims of 1920, during the entry of the Red Army into Arkhangelsk, including priests and officers. However, some remains could have been victims of the executions in 1918-1919. It is possible that they belonged to soldiers from the Barracks of the Uprising. In 1993, the remains accumulated by the searchers were buried at the Vologda cemetery in Arkhangelsk, opposite the memorial to the victims of the intervention.