Matvei Shkiryatov

3 August] 1883 — 18 January 1954) was a Communist Party official and functionary who rose to power in the Soviet Union during the rule of Joseph Stalin.

Though far less well known than successive chiefs of the Soviet police, such as Nikolai Yezhov or Lavrentiy Beria, he was arguably as steeply involved as either of them in the repression during the Stalin years.

In 1921, Vladimir Lenin ordered a purge of the communist party, to remove unsuitable individuals who had joined during the chaos of the civil war.

[3] In January 1933, the Central Committee heard a case presented by Shkiryatov and the CCC Chairman Jan Rudzutak against a group of Bolsheviks who had had a private meeting at which they had discussed the crisis in the countryside, including mass starvation known in Ukraine as Holodomor, and had talked about removing Stalin from office.

In 1933, the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov wrote a long, angry and detailed letter to Stalin about mass starvation in his home district of Veshenskaya, near Rostov, and about the abusive behaviour of named police officers.

[6] In February 1937, Shkiryatov again acted as a prosecutor at a plenum of the Central Committee, when the two of Lenin's former comrades, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov were accused of having plotted against Stalin.

[8] In 1939, he was put in charge of investigating the communist youth league, Komsomol, and sent Stalin a memo suggesting that the head of the organisation, Alexander Kosarev, should be reprimanding, adding: "If something is not right, you will correct me."

Reputedly, on the second day, Shkiryatov noticed that Prokofiev, the composer of Peter and the Wolf was talking, and ordered him to pay attention.

"[10] In December 1948, after the creation of the state of Israel had led Stalin to suspect that there were Jewish nationalists operating secretly in the USSR, Shkiryatov and the police chief Viktor Abakumov drew up a report denouncing Polina Zhemchuzhina, head of textile and wife of Vyacheslav Molotov for her links to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

[13] The historian A. Vaksberg wrote: "M. F. Shkiryatov - one of the most vile Stalinist apparatchiks, whose name, with full reason, stands in line with Yezhov and Beria.