Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov was a Soviet politician and member of the Extraordinary Commission Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation.
Background
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. After Yefim was born in 1891, the family decided to move to Chita.
Career
He was a key figure in the Red Terror, the Great Purge and dekulakization that saw millions of people executed and deported. Yevdokimov himself was arrested on 9 November 1938 and executed 2 February 1940. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
In the late 1920s, he was chief of the Joint State Political Administration 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, the first Stalinist show trial, against the wishes of his superior, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. During the Great Purge, in 1937, he presided over a ruthless purge of the party and police apparatus in the region.
He also twice asked Stalin for permission to have Sholokhov arrested, but was refused. He held out for five months being forced to confess to having plotted to assassinate Stalin and others
He was shot on 2 February 1940.
Yevdokimov was rehabilitated in 1956.
Politics
He 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 Extraordinary Commission Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation. He was barred from further promotion in the secret police, but switched to party work as First Secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in January 1934.
Membership
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.