Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov (; – 2 February 1940) 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.
Yevdokimov himself was arrested on 9 November 1938 and executed 2 February 1940. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.
Biography
Yevdokimov was born either in Perm, in European Russia, or in Kopal, Semirechye Oblast, Russian Empire (now Qapal, Kazakhstan). 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. According to one source, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1907, 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. Released in 1911, he was confined to the Kamyshinsky District, where he joined the anarcho-syndicalists, before absconding to return illegally to Siberia.
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, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.