He was a key figure in the Red Terror, the Great Purge and dekulakization that saw millions of people executed and deported.

Yevdokimov became a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1934 and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1937.

[1] Yevdokimov was born either in Perm,[2] in European Russia, or in Kopal, Semirechye Oblast, Russian Empire (now Qapal, Kazakhstan).

[2] After leaving the Verkhneudinsk prison in 1911, he was confined to the Kamyshinsky District, where he joined the anarcho-syndicalists, before absconding to return illegally to Siberia.

According to one source, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1907,[4] 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.

On November 21, 1920, he was appointed head of the special “Crimean Shock Group”, which supervised the execution of the captured military personnel of Wrangel’s Army, despite promises of amnesty.

The award list noted: During the defeat of General Wrangel's army in Crimea, comrade Evdokimov and his expedition cleared the Crimean peninsula of white officers and counterintelligence officers remaining there for the underground, seizing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels, the same number of counterintelligence officers and a total of up to 12,000 white elements, thereby preventing the possibility of white gangs appearing in Crimea.At the end of the Civil War, he was appointed head of the secret operational department of the All-Ukrainian Cheka.

In 1933, he was elected first secretary of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

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,[5] but while Joseph Stalin was on holiday in Sochi, Yevdokimov met him, repeated his allegations, and won his support.

[7] In January 1929, the First Secretary of the North Caucasus territorial committee (kraikom) of the CPSU Andrey 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.

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.

Yevdokimov was transferred to Pyatigorsk as First Secretary of the North Caucasus kraikom, and in February was elected a member of the Central Committee.

In January 1937, Yevdokimov was appointed First Secretary of the Azov-Black Sea kraikom, after the incumbent, Boris Sheboldayev, was sacked for allowing former oppositionists to hold jobs in the region.

Evdokimov came to me twice and demanded permission to arrest Sholokhov because he was talking with former White Guards,” Stalin said in 1938, during a meeting with the Veshenians released from prison.

Mikhail Suslov, who would rise to be one of the most powerful leaders of the Soviet communist in the 1960s and 1970s, was posted to Rostov, initially as one of Yevdokimov's deputies.

"[15] In August 1938, Lavrentiy Beria was appointed deputy head of the NKVD, and started building cases against Yezhov and those linked to him.

On the contrary, during my time in the ranks of the party and at work in the bodies of the Cheka – OGPU, I waged a determined struggle against all manifestations of counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activities.

It really bothers me that I have slandered many people...[13]On 17 January, to break his resistance, he was confronted by Yezhov and Nikolayev-Zhurid, who had confessed and had named Yevdokimov as a member of their anti-Soviet organisation.

[13] He finally broke down on 13 April 1939, while being interrogated under torture by Beria's deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov, and confessed to having plotted to assassinate Stalin and others.

[18] Their son, Yuir, who was born in Kharkov in 1920, was arrested several months after his parents, on 12 April 1939, and tried and executed on the same day as his mother.