HM Prison Pentonville hundreds throughout the British Empire. For instance, Pentonville was used as a model for the eventual construction of Corradino Prison in Rahal Gdid, Malta by W. Lamb Arrowsmith in 1842. Prisoners under sentence of death were not housed at Pentonville Prison until the closure of Newgate in 1902, when Pentonville took over executions in north London. Condemned cells were added and an execution room built to house Newgate's gallows. At the same time Pentonville took over from Newgate the function of being the training location for future executioners. Irish revolutionary Roger Casement was hanged there on 3 August 1916 and
The Great Terror trials had become a topic of discussion for a number of Western writers and had underlain books such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". According to the book, the trials and executions of these former Communist leaders were a minor detail of the purges, which together with man-made famines had led to 20 million deaths according to his estimates. In the appendix of the original 1968 edition of "The Great Terror", Conquest estimated 700,000 "legal" executions took place during 1937 and 1938, which was roughly confirmed by the 681,692 executions found in the Soviet archives