On 10.02.1940, the first mass deportation of Poles deep into the USSR, carried out by the NKVD, took place. About 140,000 Polish citizens were deported from the Eastern Borderlands at that time. Poles accounted for 70% of the contingent arrested and deported, the remainder being Belorussians and Ukrainians. The deportees were mainly military settlers, middle-ranking and lower-ranking civil servants, forest service and railway workers, as well as their families. The deportees were sent, among others, to the Sverdlovsk region. The weather conditions here were very bad. The deportees worked beyond their strength at logging. The housing settlements and work regime were of a gulag nature. The mortality rate of this group was the highest of all and in the first few months accounted for about 3-4% of all the deportees at that time.

Tens of thousands of people of different nationalities, residents of nearby Sverdlovsk, who were repressed by the Soviet regime, are buried in the Kostousov cemetery. Among them are many Polish deportees, who arrived here in 1940. In the 1980s or 1990s, a monument was erected in the cemetery to honour the dead. This monument was desecrated by unknown perpetrators in 2023. - The cross and the plaques with inscriptions in Polish and Russian were removed (the boulder to which they were attached was left behind). This act of vandalism was to be explained by the Russian services.