This corner of Tiraspol was significant long before the memorial rose. In the 1920s, a square already occupied the site, and during the Russian Civil War the cavalry commander Grigory Kotovsky was buried here after the city was taken from the White forces. The decision to build a formal memorial complex came in the early 1970s, and it opened on Defender of the Fatherland Day in 1972. That same day, in a solemn ceremony, the remains of Red Army soldiers and officers, most of them natives of the region and the Moldavian SSR, were reburied at the new complex. The gesture was intimate as well as official: staff of the Tiraspol museum of local history wrote roughly nine hundred letters to the families and friends of the men laid to rest there, so that each grave might be tied back to a name, a home, a person who was missed.

Among the memorial's centerpieces stands a T-34-85 tank, and it carries a story that turns a machine of war into something almost unbearably human. The tank had been the combat vehicle of Lieutenant Boris Sergeev, who fought alongside his father, Vasily Antonovich Sergeev, a colonel in the Red Army. Boris and his crew were killed during the Budapest Offensive in January 1945. At his father's request, the tank was brought back from Hungary that April, all the way to Soviet soil. Beneath it now rests a capsule of earth carried from Volgograd, the city whose defense marked one of the war's most terrible turning points. A father brought his son's tank home; a nation buried a handful of sacred soil beneath it. Few war relics anywhere carry their weight so plainly.

The memorial kept receiving the dead. Its last burials came in 1992, during the Transnistria War, and among them was Nikolai Ostapenko, a local council head killed in an attack that April. In 1995 a monument was added for the soldiers lost in the Soviet-Afghan War. When the complex was reconstructed in 2009 and 2010, at a cost of about a million rubles, it gained a Wall of Memory carved with the names of every Transnistrian defender who died between 1990 and 1992, and a sculpture of the Grieving Mother, that eternal figure of war bending over the fallen. In 2011 the small chapel of St. George the Victorious was built and consecrated nearby, adding a place of prayer to a place of remembrance, so that grief and faith might stand side by side.