Yefim Yevdokimov

Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov (Russian: Ефи́м Гео́ргиевич Евдоки́мов; 20 January [O.S. 8 January] 1891 – 2 February 1940)[1] was a Soviet politician and member of the Cheka and OGPU. He was a key figure in the Red Terror, the Great Purge and dekulakization that saw millions of people executed and deported.

Yefim Yevdokimov
Ефим Евдокимов
Yevdokimov in 1938
First Secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the CPSU
In office
January 1934 – 13 March 1937
Preceded byBoris Sheboldayev
Succeeded byPost disestablished
First Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea Regional Committee of the CPSU
In office
13 March 1937 – 13 September 1937
Preceded byPost established
Succeeded byPost disestablished
First Secretary of the Rostov Regional Committee of the CPSU
In office
13 September 1937 – May 1938
Preceded byPost established
Succeeded byBoris Dvinsky
Deputy People's Commissar of Water Transport of the Soviet Union
In office
May 1938 – 9 November 1938
Personal details
Born(1891-01-20)20 January 1891
Kopal, Semirechye Oblast, Russian Empire
Died2 February 1940(1940-02-02) (aged 49)
Kommunarka shooting ground, Moscow, Soviet Union
Resting placeKommunarka shooting ground
NationalityRussian
Political partyCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (1917–1938)

Yevdokimov himself was arrested on 9 November 1938 and executed 2 February 1940. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.[1]

Biography

Yevdokimov was born either in Perm,[2] in European Russia, or in Kopal, Semirechye Oblast, Russian Empire (now Qapal, Kazakhstan).[3] His family were poor peasants. His father, Georgy Savvateyevich Yevdokimov, was a peasant from Kursk who joined the Semirechye Cossacks. In Semirechye he married a young peasant, Anastasia Arkhipovna. In 1893, two years after Yefim, the family moved to Chita. As a teenager, Yefim was caught up in the violence during the suppression of the 1905 revolution. He was arrested in 1907, and sentenced to four years hard labour.[2] According to one source, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1907,[4] but there was also a rumour later known to his colleagues in the soviet police that he was arrested not for revolutionary activity, but as a common criminal.[5] Released in 1911, he was confined to the Kamyshinsky District, where he joined the anarcho-syndicalists, before absconding to return illegally to Siberia.[2]

In June 1917, following the February Revolution, Yevdokimov was drafted into a reserve regiment in Siberia. In 1918, he joined the Red Army, and the communist party, and in 1919 he joined the Cheka. In 1923, Yevdokimov was appointed head of the OGPU in the North Caucasus region, based in Rostov. He was based in this territory for the next 15 years.

The Shakhty Trial

In 1927, Yevdokimov claimed to be close to uncovering a network of saboteurs who were undermining industrial production in south Russia, directed, he claimed, from abroad. The head of the OGPU, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky reputedly did not believe him and threatened to have him arrested unless he produced solid evidence, in which he was backed by the head of the USSR government, Alexei Rykov,[5] but while Josif Stalin was on holiday in Sochi, Yevdokimov met him, repeated his allegations, and won his support. This was the origin of the first of the provincial show trials of the Stalin era, the Shakhty Trial,[6] in which 53 managers and engineers from the town of Shakhty, near Rostov, were accused of sabotage, five of whom were executed, and 40 sent to prison. Yevdolikov was in charge of forcing the defendants to confess and ensuring they would not withdraw their confessions in court.[7]

In January 1929, the First Secretary of the North Caucasus territorial committee (kraikom) of the CPSUAndrey Andreyev, and two other high ranking Stalinists, Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Anastas Mikoyan nominated Yevdokimov for the Order of the Red Banner for his role in preparing the trial, but the award was not granted, apparently because of criticisms of his handling of the interrogations, after 23 defendants denied the charges, and others retracted in court the confessions they had made under interrogation.

Yevdokimov was barred from further promotion within the OGPU, for as long as it was controlled by Menzhinsky and his deputy, Genrikh Yagoda. Retained in Rostov, he was responsible, with Andreyev, in forcing the peasants in North Caucasus to move onto collective farms. In 1930, the North Caucasus OGPU was set a target of 6,000–8,000 'kulaks' who were to be arrested and executed, and 20,000 to be deported from the territory and the adjoining Dagestan republic. In April 1933, the writer, Mikhail Sholokhov, who lived within the territory, wrote to Stalin accusing two of Yevdokimov's officers of using torture to extract grain from peasant households. Both men were banned from working in the area.[8]

But Stalin evidently continued to rate Yevdokimov highly. According to the OGPU officer Alexander Orlov, Stalin proposed to appoint him head of the Leningrad regional OGPU, but the local party boss, Sergei Kirov, objected. Orlov believed that Stalin was planning Kirov's assassination, which Yevdokimov was to have organised.[9]

In January 1934, the North Caucasian territory was divided administratively into two. One part, centred on Rostov, was renamed the Azov-Black Sea territory. Yevdokimov was transferred to Pyatigorsk as First Secretary of the North Caucasus kraikom, and in February was elected a member of the Central Committee. He was the first career officer from the OGPU to be appointed to a party post of that seniority.[8]

The Great Purge

After Nikolai Yezhov was appointed head of the NKVD – as the OGPU was now named – in September 1936, Yevdokimov was one of very few local party bosses who were trusted to conduct the Great Purge without outside interference. Yezhov trusted him because he had been on bad terms with Yagoda. When the Central Committee convened in February 1937, Yevdokimov accused Yagoda of obstructing his efforts to expose "vile double-dealers" who had "wormed their way" into responsible positions in the North Caucasus territory to pursue "counter-revolutionary aims," and turned on him saying: "You, Yagoda, were once my boss: what help did I get from you?"[10] After Yagoda's arrest, Stalin proposed that Yevdokimov take over the task of forcing a confession out of Yagoda.[11]

According to Yezhov's biographer, he "put special trust in Chekists from North Caucasia, like Yefim Yevdokimov".[12] Yevdokimov's former deputy, Israel Dagin, was appointed head of the Kremlin guards; Dagin's former deputy, Nikolai Nikolayev-Zhurid, was made head of the Special department, which handled the purge of the Red Army; and Vladimir Kursky, who had been chief investigator at the Shahkty trial, was appointed head of the Secret Political Department, which dealt with major political cases, such as the interrogation of Yagoda.

In January 1937, Yevdokimov was appointed First Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea kraikom, after the incumbent, Boris Sheboldayev, was sacked for allowing former oppositionists to hold jobs in the region. Yevdokimov was set a target to have 14,000 people arrested,[13] from a population of just over 5.6 million.[14] It is likely that he exceeded that figure.

In September 1937, the territory was split again, and Yevdokimov was designated First Secretary of the Rostov region.

One of those arrested during Yevdokimov's purge was Pyotr Lugovoi, secretary of Veshenskaya district party committee who was a close friend and near neighbour Mikhail Sholokhov, who complained to Stalin, and refused to join a writers' delegation until his friend was released. After Lugovoi and two others known to Sholokhov were released, he complained to Yevdokimov that they had been tortured, and demanded that the officers responsible should be disciplined. When Yevdokimov fobbed him off, Sholokhov wrote to Stalin in February 1938 denouncing Yevdokimov as a "crafty old fox", who was either hopeless, or an enemy. Yevdokimov twice sought Stalin's permission to have Sholokhov arrested, complaining that anyone else who behaved as Sholokhov did "would have been arrested long ago."[8]

Dismissal and death

In spring 1938, possibility because of Sholokhov's complaints, Stalin appears to have decided that Yevdokimov had ordered too many arrests. Mikhail Suslov, who would rise to be one of the most powerful leaders of the Soviet communist in the 1960s and 1970s, was posted to Rostov, initially as one of Yevdokimov's deputies. Yevdokimov's assistant, a career chekist named Pavel Manichkin, was arrested. On 4 May 1938, Yevdokimov was transferred to Moscow as Deputy People's Commissar for Water Transport, under Yezhov, who had been appointed People's Commissar, while temporarily retaining his post as head of the NKVD. In June, Suslov reported to a party conference in Rostov that "the practice of indiscriminate expelling from the party has ceased. An end has been put to impunity for a various number of slanderers. Gradually the general suspiciousness is breaking down."[15]

In August 1938, Lavrentiy Beria was appointed deputy head of the NKVD, and started building cases against Yezhov and those linked to him. Nikolayev-Zhurid was arrested on 25 October, Dagin on 5 November, and Yevdokimov on 9 November 1938.[16] He was accused of having plotted with Yezhov and others to kill Stalin after they had received news of Beria's appointment.

For five months, Yevdokimov resisted signing any confession. Despite being severely tortured, he signed a statement declaring "I cannot accept the accusation of treason ... On the contrary, I waged a resolute struggle against all manifestations of counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activity."[13] On 17 January, to break his resistance, he was confronted by Yezhov and Nikolayev-Zhurid, who had confessed and had named Yevdokimov as a member of their anti-Soviet organisation. On 2 March, doctors insisted that he be transferred to a prison hospital because of the effects of torture.[13] He finally broke down on 13 April 1939, while being interrogated under torture by Beria's deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, and confessed to having plotted to assassinate Stalin and others. On 16 January 1940, Yevdokimov, his wife, and 19-year-old son were all included with Yezhov, Dagin, Nikolayev-Zhurid, the writer Isaac Babel, and many others linked to Yezhov on a list drawn up by Beria of 346 people who were to be executed.[17]

At his trial, on 2 February 1940, Yevdokimov withdrew his previous confession, asserting: "I was not scum (сволочь), but I became one during the investigation, because I could not stand it and began to lie, and I began to lie because I was hit hard on the heels."[13] He was sentenced to death and shot the same day, at the Kommunarka shooting ground.

Yevdokimov was rehabilitated on 17 March 1956.[4]

Family

Yevdokimov's wife, Marina, was arrested on the same day as her husband, accused of counter-revolutionary activity, tried on 26 January 1940, and shot the following day.[18] Their son, Yuir, who was born in Kharkov in 1920, was arrested several months after his parents, on 12 April 1939, and tried and executed on the same day as his mother.[19]

Honours and awards

On 19 July 1935, the village of Medvezhensky (now Krasnogvardeyskoye, Stavropol Krai) was renamed "Yevdokimovsky" in honor of Yevdokimov, the first secretary of the North Caucasus Krai. After Yevdokimov's arrest as an "enemy of the people" in 1938, the town was renamed "Molotov" in honor of Vyacheslav Molotov.[22]

See also

References
  1. "Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич" (in Russian). Alexander Yakovlev Archives. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  2. "Ефим Георгиевич Евдокимов". 24 April 2023.
  3. Mikhail Tumshis; Alexander Papchinsky (2009). "Евдокимов и другие (Yevdokimov and Others)". 1937 Большая чистка НКВД против ЧК [The 1937 NKVD Great Purge Against the Cheka]. Яуза. ISBN 978-5699343607.
  4. "Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич (1891)". Открытый списоk (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  5. Conquest, Robert (1985). Inside Stalin's Secret Police, NKVD Politics 1936–39. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. pp. 25, 33. ISBN 0-333-39260-4.
  6. Ellman, Michael (December 2003). "The Soviet 1937–1938 Provincial Show Trials Revisited". Europe-Asia Studies. 55 (8): 1305–1321. doi:10.1080/0966813032000141123. JSTOR 3594508. S2CID 144186196. Retrieved 26 April 2023.
  7. Rayfield, Donald (2004). Stalin and His Hangmen, The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York: Random House. p. 162. ISBN 0-375-50632-2.
  8. McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watch. New York: The New Press. pp. 207–11. ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6.
  9. Orlov, Alexander (1954). The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. London: Jarrolds. p. 28.
  10. J. Arch Getty, and Oleg V. Naumov (1999). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Yale U.P. pp. 334, 439. ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
  11. Rayfield. Stalin and His Hangmen. pp. 285–6.
  12. Marc Jansen, and Nikita Petrov (2002). Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-8179-2902-2.
  13. "Доклад Комиссии ЦК КПСС Президиуму ЦК КПСС по установлению причин массовых репрессий против членов и кандидатов в члены ЦК ВКП(б), избранных на ХVII съезде партии. 9 февраля 1956 г." Исторические Материалы. Retrieved 24 April 2023.
  14. "USSR Population Distribution (1937)". Retrieved 2 May 2023.
  15. Jansen, and Petrov. Stalin's Loyal Executioner. p. 153.
  16. Jansen, and Petrov. Stalin's Loyal Executioner. p. 165.
  17. "РГАСПИ, ф.17, оп.171, дело 377, лист 116 slide 2 of 15 – Список от 16.01.1940". Stalin.memo.ru. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
  18. "Евдокимова Марина Карловна (1895)". Открытый список (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  19. "Евдокимов Юрий Ефимович (1920)". Открытый список (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  20. Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич (1891–1940) (in Russian). Russian-Dossier.ru. Archived from the original on 18 February 2015. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  21. Jansen, Marc and Nikolai Petrov (2002). Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. pp. 184, 186. ISBN 978-0-8179-2902-2.
  22. Краткая справка об административно-территориальных изменениях Ставропольского края за 1920—1992 гг. [Background on administrative-territorial changes in the Stavropol Krai from 1920–1992] (in Russian). Archives of the Stavropol Krai. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
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