People had long known that there was an animal burial ground at the Tivali state farm. Bones of animals that died from epidemics and disease were brought there. In the 1960s the capital of the BSSR expanded — the city approached these areas and new houses began to be built. The burial ground was planned to be eliminated, but during its excavation human remains were found among the animal bones, twisted with barbed wire and with gunshot wounds to the skulls. By order from above, the bones of people and animals were burned and buried in the forest near the road to Rakau. According to historian Igor Kuznyatsov, the burial ground was discovered and destroyed already in the 1990s during the construction of the “Pushkinskaya” metro station.
In the early 1990s, poet Syarhey Zakonnikaŭ told a story he had heard that allegedly in 1938, by order of then‑Stalin's People's Commissar of Railways Lazar Kaganovich “for sabotage” — for refusing to send deportee trains to Siberia and the Arctic — about 300 Belarusian railway workers were shot. To hide the crime, their bodies were supposedly buried in the animal burial ground in Tivali. Moved, Zakonnikaŭ even wrote a poem titled “Tivali”.
Indeed, Kaganovich served three times as People's Commissar of Railways. During the period of the “Great Terror” he was among those who took part in compiling the so‑called “Stalin lists” — lists of people sentenced to the highest measure of punishment with the personal sanction of the Central Committee leadership of the VKP(b). Kaganovich's signature appears on 189 lists, according to which more than 19,000 people were executed.
On November 13, 1936, an NKVD order “On strengthening the fight against accidents on railway transport” was issued, and on July 29, 1937 — an order of the Main Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Militia of the NKVD on the “cleansing of the railways from socially harmful elements”. Every accident on the railway was regarded as sabotage, for which one could receive a bullet in the back of the head.
In 1937–1938 broad purges took place in Minsk, resulting in dozens of railway workers being executed. The exact locations of the shootings are difficult to determine today. Nevertheless, memorial events for the killed employees of the Belarusian Railway have been repeatedly held at the site of the former animal burial ground in Tivali.