Milda Draule

Milda Draule was the wife of Leonid Nikolaev. She was a Latvian and an active Communist Party member who worked in the Smolny. There has been some suggestion that she may have been having an affair with Sergei Kirov, the First Secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party, and that her husband's decision to assassinate Kirov may have been based upon sexual jealousy. However, Amy Knight points out in "Who Killed Kirov: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery" that Draule was noted for her extreme plainness, and Kirov preferred liaisons with ballerinas and other women of notable beauty.

After the assassination of Kirov, Draule was swept up in the mass arrests and was apparently executed after a trial that lasted less than fifteen minutes, as was the practice for many political prisoners.