In the 1930s, the Soviet people endured terrible trials. According to various estimates, around 10 million people were executed during the Great Terror. In Penza, the death penalty was carried out in the gloomy Akhun forests.

Prisoners were brought in at night, trying not to attract attention. Under the headlights, they hurriedly dug their own graves. To muffle the sounds of gunfire from the Nagans, NKVD officers started the engines of trucks, after which a volley was heard. The execution site was carefully concealed, but sometimes local residents became accidental witnesses. Professor Oleg Alexandrovich Barsukov recalled: "My mother once returned from the dacha. The road went between the pines, and suddenly she noticed a hand sticking out of freshly dug sand. The fingers were slightly moving. By clearing the sand, she helped a young man with a gunshot wound to get out. He told her that there had been an execution here at night, but he was lucky, the bullet grazed him." The Akhun forests were chosen as the execution site not only because of their location on the outskirts of the city but also due to the sandy soil, which made digging graves easier.

Ivan Osipovich Kistin, an old-timer of the Surka checkpoint, recounted that executions of political prisoners also took place near Lake Kalashny Zaton, where the village of Sosnovka is now located. According to him, there was no village here in the 1930s. "My father said that in the 30s, condemned prisoners were brought here at night in trucks. Gunshots could be heard. The prisoners dug their own graves and buried themselves at a depth of half a meter. Later, when sand was taken from these places for construction, skulls, bones, whole skeletons, and leather boots were found." When asked about the exact location of the burials, he replied that they were buried on the shore of the lake, by the sandy hill, where pines now grow, which were not there at that time.

It is difficult to establish the exact number of victims, as some documents are still classified.