Among the prisoners of the Oryol prison sentenced to execution were several prominent political figures. Christian Rakovsky, a Bulgarian by nationality, a former member of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) since 1918 and chairman of the
Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1938 as part of the
Third Moscow Trial as an "English and Japanese spy". Maria Spiridonova, a well-known revolutionary, one of the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had withdrawn from political activity in the early 1920s, was also arrested and by the time of her execution had already been serving a sentence in Oryol for a long time on charges of preparing an assassination attempt on
Kliment Voroshilov. Spiridonova's fate was shared by her husband, also a former Socialist Revolutionary, I. A. Mayorov, who served time in the same prison, but at the same time knew nothing about his wife's fate: the inquiries sent by Mayorov to various authorities were not answered. In the same cell with Mayorov were the former member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party V. A. Chaikin, the Socialist Revolutionary A. A. Izmailovich and the professor of Roman law at
Kyiv University V. V. Karpeko. In addition to the prisoners listed above, the following were shot in the Medvedev Forest: V. V. Arnold, who was once accused of attempting to assassinate
Vyacheslav Molotov, former engineer of
Kuzbassugol M. S. Stroilov (he, along with Arnold, was accused of sabotage), former adviser to the USSR Plenipotentiary Mission in Germany
S. A. Bessonov, famous physician and professor D. D. Pletnev, convicted of involvement in the murder of
Maxim Gorky, “red professor” A. Yu. Aikhenwald, and responsible employee of the Comintern V. D. Kasparova. The same fate befell the former People's Commissar of Finance, left communist
Varvara Yakovleva. The relatives of several prominent figures were also killed, including the sister of
Leon Trotsky and first wife of
Lev Kamenev,
Olga Kameneva, Olga Okudzhava (sister of previously repressed Bolsheviks Mikhail, Shalva and Nikolai Okudzhava, wife of the poet
Galaktion Tabidze, aunt of Bulat Okudzhava) and the youngest son of
Grigory Petrovsky, Pyotr, as well as the brother of
Nikolai Yezhov, Sergei. A significant part of the execution list consisted of Asian names: one of them was Ashurbek Khusravbekov (a native of the village of Pish, Darmorakht village council, Shugnan district, Tajik SSR, Tajik, citizen of the USSR); there were especially many Chinese among those sentenced. Many of the convicted had citizenship/nationality of foreign countries or were of foreign origin. The latter included, in particular, the German mathematician
Fritz Noether, for whose release
Albert Einstein had petitioned the USSR authorities. ==References==