Varvara Yakovleva

Imprisonment and death Yakovleva was arrested by the NKVD on 12 September 1937 and taken into custody, where she was charged with sabotage and terrorism against the Soviet Union, and of membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", with interrogators bringing up the bisexual Yakovleva's past same-sex relationships as "evidence" of her "Trotskyite-fascist tendencies". She was also expelled from the Communist Party. According to the historian Roy Medvedev, Yakovleva's 'evidence' was "a fraudulent deposition written for her by the investigators." Afterwards, Yakovleva asked her cellmates to spread the word - if they survived - that her deposition was lies that she had been forced to sign after torture.

At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, Yakovleva was convicted of sabotage, terrorism and membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement at Oryol Prison, where she was executed on 11 September 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre, together with 156 other inmates. The Medvedev Forest massacre came less than three months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and 26 days before Nazi troops invaded Oryol. (Several Soviet sources falsely gave the date of her death as 21 December 1944).

She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.