The cemetery was established in the early 1920s on the slope of a mountain near the Church-Monument of the Nativity of Christ. The first known burials date back to April 1922. Here, Russian military emigrants and disabled individuals living in the shelter of the Russian Red Cross Society for wounded and elderly warriors at the Church-Monument were buried. Among the buried were predominantly generals and staff officers, but there were also senior officers and privates, mostly Cossacks from Russian Cossack settlements in Bulgaria. Most of them were veterans of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, who arrived in Bulgaria after the Civil War in Russia. They received pensions from the Bulgarian government, and many were awarded Bulgarian orders in honor of the 50th anniversary of the country's independence. Another part of the buried consisted of servicemen from the Russian Imperial Army, the Armed Forces of Southern Russia, the Russian Army of Baron P. N. Wrangel, and the Don Army. The cemetery functioned until the mid-1950s. Over 30 years, about 200 people were buried there. Currently, the cemetery area is heavily overgrown with trees and shrubs, making it almost impassable. Nevertheless, dozens of gravestones have survived in the cemetery. Despite its location in one of Bulgaria's popular tourist spots, the cemetery has never been included in tourist routes.

Since 2010, writer and television host from Belarus Vyacheslav Bondarenko, a descendant of one of the buried officers, along with enthusiasts from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, began a project to improve and memorialize the cemetery. Accurate data on more than 400 buried individuals was collected.

On June 20, 2013, an initiative committee for the restoration of the cemetery was created in Bulgaria, and work on its arrangement began. On August 14, 2013, a nationwide campaign for the revival of the cemetery was announced, and a charitable bank account was opened for this purpose.

On February 27, 2014, a memorial sign was solemnly opened and consecrated at the entrance to the cemetery in the presence of representatives of the Shipka city administration and the abbot of the Shipka Monastery of the Nativity of Christ.