The deputy commissar who manufactured the wrecking cases
In 1934, Time magazine described Prokofiev as the OGPU commissar "who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, 'shot for sabotage.'"
A Chekist who, as OGPU Economic Directorate chief (1926–1931), manufactured the great 'wrecking' cases against Soviet technical specialists. Rose to NKVD second deputy commissar under Yagoda, then was arrested and executed in 1937 after Yagoda's fall.
Career Timeline
- 1922–1926Chief of the OGPU Secret Department, then the Information Department
- 1926–1931Chief of the Economic Directorate, OGPU
- 1932–1934Deputy chairman of the OGPU
- 1932–1934Chief of the Main Directorate of Workers' and Peasants' Militia (concurrent)
- 1934–1936Second Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
- 1936–1937First Deputy People's Commissar of Communications
- 1937Arrested and executed
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionPolitical commissar of balloon unit
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationDeputy Chairman of OGPU
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeYagoda's second deputy commissarHe built the wrecking cases against technical specialists as head of the Economic Directorate, became Yagoda's second deputy on the NKVD's creation, and was shot in 1937 with Yagoda's circle.
The OGPU Economic Directorate and the 'Wrecking' Cases
When Prokofiev took charge of the OGPU Economic Directorate (EKU) in 1926, it was still a modest operation. But beginning with the Shakhty Trial of 1928, the EKU emerged as the key instrument of Stalin's purge of 'bourgeois specialists.' In the Shakhty case, 53 engineers and managers from the Donbas coal mines were arrested on charges of 'wrecking'; eleven were sentenced to death. The trial activated Article 58's sabotage provisions in earnest and set the template for all that followed.
Under Prokofiev, the Economic Directorate expanded its wrecking investigations into food supply, armaments, railways, and finance. The 1930 'Industrial Party' trial and the 1931 Menshevik trial repeated the same pattern. His EKU systematically recast production failures and industrial accidents as deliberate sabotage by 'class enemies,' targeting the technical specialists trained before the Revolution.
By the time Time magazine described him in 1934 as the commissar 'who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, shot for sabotage,' Prokofiev's name had become synonymous with the fabrication of economic wrecking cases.