In June that year he was sent as a political organizer to the Comintern Locomotive Factory in Kharkiv, where he was responsible for the Party branch of the workers in the T-34 tanks' production line.

[2] After the beginning of German invasion in June 1941, Yepishev became responsible for directing the war effort in the region: he mobilized the Kharkiv people's militia, of which he was the commissar, and organized partisan formations.

In October 1941, shortly before the city's fall to the enemy, he was evacuated to the Urals, where he was appointed first secretary of the Party committee in Nizhny Tagil, and as such was responsible for the rebuilding of the arms factories transferred from the front line areas.

The head of the MGB in this period, Semyon Ignatyev seems to have been an ineffectual figure, implying that Yepishev may have been the effective chief of police during the time of the Doctors' plot, the Night of the Murdered Poets, the Slánský trial, and other notorious abuses of power - but like Ignatiev, and unlike other involved, such as Mikhail Ryumin, he was never called to account for whatever role he had in those affairs.

On 11 March 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, when Lavrentiy Beria resumed control of the MGB, Yepishev was returned to his post in Odessa, where he remained until August 1955.

The reason for his sudden promotion is assumed to have been a conflict between the communist party leadership and senior army officers, including Yepishev's predecessor, Filipp Golikov, and his war time colleague Marshal Moskalenko, who opposed Khrushchev's rash decision to ship nuclear missiles to Cuba.

In 1968, during the Prague Spring, when the Czechoslovak communist party under Alexander Dubček was attempting to combine state control of industry with free speech and the abolition of censorship, Yepishev was the first high-ranking official to hint publicly, in May 1968, that the USSR might use military force to suppress the experiment.

[8] In spring 1979, Yepishev led a military delegation to Kabul, just before the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979, setting off a war that lasted ten years.

[9] Yepishev's role as an MGB general is part of the plot of Robert Harris's thriller Archangel, in which he is described as "a big bastard" with a square jaw, thick brow and grim face set above a boxer's neck, and it is suggested that as an army officer "he never shot anyone, except on his own side.