Boris Sheboldayev

Sheboldayev was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Stalin's campaign to force Russian peasants to give up their private land and move to collective farming.

Writing in Pravda in October 1929, he extolled the "tremendous uplift and enthusiasm" of in the newly formed collective farms, which had been achieved, he claimed, with the support of all but 5 to 10 per cent of the rural population, despite a campaign of sabotage by 142 former Tsarist army officers, kulaks (rich peasants) traders and priests.

[2] A government official who inspected the collective farms in the region in April 1930, reported on the "repulsive" conditions in which livestock were being kept, with "cows almost up to their knees in dung, horse not looked after properly .. pigs and poultry dying."

[5] In April 1933, the writer Mikhail Sholokhov wrote a 6,000 word letter to Stalin complaining about starvation and repression in his home district of Veshenskaya in North Causcasia, naming officials he considered to be responsible, including Sheboldayev, and pleading for 'genuine communists' to be posted to the area.

On 31 December 1936, near the start of the Great Purge, Sheboldayev was summoned in front of the Politburo, in Moscow, to explain why he had allowed a number of former supporters of the Left Opposition, such as Nikolai Glebov-Avilov and Alexander Beloborodov to hold jobs in the Azov Black-Sea, and why Ovchinnikov – who had worked with Sheboldayev in the Lower Volga region – had been appointed chairman of the Rostov city soviet after being removed from his former post, and why he had ignored warnings delivered to him by Stalin in person.

On 6 January, Sheboldayev was sacked, after a Politburo member, Andrey Andreyev had been dispatched to Rostov to ensure that the local party committee was brought into line.