Andrei Andreyevich Andreyev

Born to a peasant family in Kuznetsovo, Smolensk Governorate, he had two years of rural schooling and went to Moscow in 1908 at age 13, working as a tavern dishwasher. He encountered Marxism at workers' courses, joined Social-Democratic circles in 1911–1912, moved to St Petersburg in 1914 and joined the Bolsheviks. He took part in the October Revolution and the 2nd Congress of Soviets, and as CC secretary he effectively ran the Orgburo and was dispatched to purge regional party organizations during the Great Terror. He sat in the top leadership for 20 years as a full Politburo member (1932–1952). A USSR Supreme Soviet deputy in 1937–1962, from 1962 he was adviser to the Supreme Soviet Presidium. He died in Moscow on 5 December 1971 and is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

During the Great Terror (1937–1938), it was standard practice to dispatch a high-ranking party official from Moscow to the provinces to 'verify' regional party organizations and replace their leadership. Andreyev, as the CC secretary who effectively ran the Orgburo, was the figure most frequently assigned this task, becoming, in J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov's phrase, "the unchallengeable master of these murderous roadshows."

Between June and September 1937 alone, he travelled to Voronezh, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kursk, Saratov, Kuybyshev, Tashkent, Stalinabad, Rostov, and Krasnodar in succession. In Saratov, where he arrived on 20 July 1937, his main target was the local NKVD chief Yakov Agranov, arrested and shot, along with the second secretary of the regional party and others. At the same time, Andreyev identified 20 employees of the Machine Tractor Stations who were "working very obstructively"; Stalin replied by telegram the same day ordering them all shot. In total, 430 people were executed in the wake of his Saratov visit.

In Kuybyshev, he ordered the regional party boss Pavel Postyshev to intensify the hunt for hidden enemies, after which Postyshev disbanded most local party branches and had 3,300 party members arrested. By year's end, Postyshev was deemed to have gone too far, and Andreyev was paradoxically assigned to collect names of those wrongfully expelled, after which Postyshev himself was arrested and shot. In Tashkent, four days after the founder of the Uzbek Communist Party, Faizullah Khojaev, and seven others were denounced as enemies of the people, First Secretary Akmal Ikramov was expelled from the party; the ensuing purge saw 430 executed. In Stalinabad, Tajikistan, Andreyev had 344 shot.

Nikita Khrushchev later recalled: "Andrei Andreyevich did very much evil during the 1937 repressions. Perhaps because of his own past, he feared being suspected of leniency toward former Trotskyists. Wherever he went, many people died." On every visit, Andreyev maintained constant telegram communication with Stalin, who invariably approved all his recommended lists of party members to be expelled or arrested.

In late 1938, after Nikolai Yezhov was removed as head of the NKVD, Andreyev chaired the Politburo commission investigating NKVD activities, an irony in which the man who had worked hand-in-glove with the terror apparatus was now tasked with 'cleaning up' its excesses.