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 in Kopal, Semirechye Oblast, Russian Empire (now Qapal, Kazakhstan). His father, Georgy Savvateyevich Yevdokimov, was a peasant from Kursk who joined the Semirechye Cossacks. In Semirechye he married a young peasant, Anastasia Arkhipovna. After Yefim was born in 1891, the family moved to Chita.[2] According to one source, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1907, but was an anarcho-syndicalist from 1911.[3]

Yevdokimov was in prison at the time of the 1917 revolution, reputedly as a criminal rather than for political reasons, but was freed by the revolution, and joined the Cheka. In the late 1920s, he was chief of the OGPU in the North Caucasus region, based in Rostov. In this capacity he is reputed to have initiated the purge that culminated in the Shakhty Trial, in May 1928, the first Stalinist show trial, against the wishes of his superior, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.[4] He was in charge of forcing the 55 defendants to confess and ensuring they would not withdraw their confessions in court.[5] Barred from further promotion in the secret police, he switched to party work as First Secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the CPSU in January 1934.

Early in the Great Purge, in January 1937, after a redrawing of regional boundaries, Yevdokimov was appointed First Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Party Committee, after the incumbent was sacked for allowing former oppositionists to hold jobs in the region. The following month, he told a plenum of the Central Committee that "vile double-dealers" had "wormed their way" into responsible positions in the region, in order to pursue "counter-revolutionary aims."[6] He also denounced the former head of the NKVD for allegedly preventing him from taking action against members of the opposition within the communist party, saying: "You, Yagoda, were once my boss: what help did I get from you?" After Yagoda's arrest, Stalin proposed that Yevdokimov take over the task of forcing a confession out of Yagoda.[7]

Yevdokimov conducted a sweeping purge of the party and police apparatus in the Azov region. This included having friends of the writer Mikhail Sholokhov arrested. He also twice asked Stalin for permission to have Sholokhov arrested, but was refused. In February 1938, Sholokhov wrote to Stalin complaining that Yevdokimov was a "crafty, lame old fox" and either an enemy of the people or "a sorry old geezer."[8]

On 4 May 1938, he was transferred to Moscow as Deputy People's Commissar for Water Transport, under N.I.Yezhov, but was arrested on 9 November 1938, along with his wife, Maria, and teenage son, Yuri, after Lavrenti Beria had wrestled control of the secret police from Yezhov. He held out for five months before being forced to confess 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, the writer Isaac Babel, on a list drawn up by Beria of 346 people who were to be executed. He was shot on 2 February 1940 at the Kommunarka shooting ground.

Yevdokimov was rehabilitated on 17 March 1956.

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.[9] Their son, Yuir, who was born in Kharkov in 1920, was arrested several months after his parents, on 12 April 1939, and tried an executed on the same day as his mother.[10]

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.[13]

See also

References
  1. "Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич" (in Russian). Alexander Yakovlev Archives. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  2. 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]. ISBN 978-5699343607.
  3. "Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич (1891)". Открытый списоk (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  4. Conquest, Robert (1985). Inside Stalin's Secret Police, NKVD Politics 1936-39. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. pp. 25, 33. ISBN 0-333-39260-4.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Rayfield. Stalin and His Hangmen. pp. 285–6.
  8. McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watch. New York: The New Press. p. 211. ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6.
  9. "Евдокимова Марина Карловна (1895)". Открытый список (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  10. "Евдокимов Юрий Ефимович (1920)". Открытый список (Open List). Retrieved 29 March 2022.
  11. Евдокимов Ефим Георгиевич (1891-1940) (in Russian). Russian-Dossier.ru. Retrieved 17 February 2015.
  12. 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.
  13. 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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