Born in the Kutais Governorate, Imperial Russia (in present-day Georgia) in the family of a landlord, Orakhelashvili studied medicine at the University of Kharkiv and St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy.

[1] He provided the preface to Тайны меньшевистского царства (Secrets of Menshevik Georgia) by Iakov Moiseyevich Shafir (1921) in which archival material was used to justify the Soviet invasion.

[4] Orakhelashvili was reinstated in his former post of First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Party Committee on On 31 October 1931, in place of Lavrenty Kartvelishvili, who had clashed with Lavrentiy Beria.

[5] In 1932, he was appointed a deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and authored several works on Communist Party history and Bolshevik activities in Transcaucasia and Georgia.

[6] During the run-up to the 17th Communist Party conference, in February 1934, Orakhelashvili was one of the leaders of a group of middle-ranking officials who met to discuss trying to remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary, and appointing Sergei Kirov in his place.

He may also have been insulted by an occasion when Stalin was on holiday in Tiflis in May 1926, and sang an obscene Georgian song in mixed company that included Maria Orakhelashvili.

[10] On 20 July, Beria sent Stalin a note saying that, while other Georgians had 'confessed' to spying and other seditious activity (probably under torture): This scoundrel and traitor Mamia Orakhelashvili is still silent.

In November 1955, eight former Georgian NKVD officers went on trial in Tbilisi, accused, among other crimes, of 'terroristic acts of violence' against Mamia and Maria Orakhelashvili, on Beria's orders.