Milda Petrovna Draule

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Marxism–Leninism 1901–1935 ✕ Shot

Wife of Kirov's assassin Leonid Nikolaev, a Smolny regional party committee employee shot as an accomplice

Born to a family of Latvian farm labourers in St Petersburg Governorate, she joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919 and moved with her family to Petrograd in 1920. In 1925 she married Leonid Nikolaev in Luga; they had two sons, and she worked at the Leningrad regional party committee in the Smolny. Her interrogation began fifteen minutes after her husband shot Kirov on 1 December 1934, and she was arrested the next day. Rumours that she had been Kirov's lover were never documented, and those who spread them were repressed. Expelled from the party in absentia in January 1935, she was sentenced to death for complicity in the assassination on 9 March by a visiting session of the Military Collegium under Ulrikh, together with her sister Olga and Olga's husband, and shot that night. She was rehabilitated in 1990.