Matvei Fyodorovich Shkiryatov
Матвей Фёдорович Шкирятов
1883–1954
○ Natural causes · gallstone disease
The eraser poised over party rolls for thirty years
January 1948, the musicians' summons at the Kremlin. As Zhdanov lectured, Shkiryatov ordered Prokofiev to pay attention. Prokofiev replied: "I never pay attention to people who haven't been introduced to me."
A Bolshevik since 1906, he began underground work among Moscow garment workers. From 1921, when he executed Lenin's first party verification, he spent three decades as Stalin's standing operational enforcer in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Committee, prosecuting Bukharin and Rykov, arresting the entire Chechen-Ingush leadership, and exiling Molotov's wife, rising to chairman of the Party Control Committee and CC Presidium member in 1952, only to be dropped from the Presidium a month after Stalin died.
Career Timeline
- 1906Joined RSDLP; underground work among Moscow garment workers
- 1910–14Arrested, exiled to Vologda; returned to Moscow Bolshevik underground
- 1917Moscow Soldiers' Soviet and Tula Soviet executive; Military Revolutionary Committee
- 1918–20Secretary, CC of Garment Workers' Union; Moscow city party committee
- 1921–34CCC member → Presidium member; ran party verification and purge operations
- 1934–39Secretary, Party Collegium of the Party Control Commission
- 1939–52Deputy chairman, Party Control Committee; CC member
- 1952–54Chairman, Party Control Committee; CC Presidium member (removed Mar 1953)
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationMember of Central Control Commission
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeOperational enforcer, Party Control CommissionAt the February 1937 CC plenum he prosecuted Bukharin and Rykov; in October 1937 he personally oversaw the arrest of the entire Chechen-Ingush leadership at their own party plenum.
The Party's Internal Prosecutor: The 1937 Plenum and the Great Terror
In January 1933, Shkiryatov, together with CCC chairman Jānis Rudzutaks, presented to the Central Committee the case of a group of Bolsheviks who had met privately to discuss the crisis in the countryside and the possibility of removing Stalin. Confronting Old Bolshevik A.P. Smirnov, a party member since 1898 who had not even attended the meeting, Shkiryatov demanded that he prove he did not sympathize with the opposition. Smirnov and those involved were expelled from the party and later shot. In May 1935, Shkiryatov headed the Central Committee commission that forcibly disbanded the Society of Old Bolsheviks, whose members had been gathering signatures against applying the death penalty to former party members. Shkiryatov's commission compelled the society to declare it had "completed its tasks," clearing the way for most of its members to be purged.
Shkiryatov's role as the party's internal prosecutor reached its sharpest expression at the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum. With Lenin's former comrades Bukharin and Rykov accused of conspiring against Stalin, Shkiryatov acted as prosecutor, declaring: "What makes you think, Bukharin and Rykov, that leniency will be shown to you? … We cannot limit ourselves to merely expelling them from the party … They must be prosecuted." Throughout Rykov's defense, Shkiryatov interjected from the floor to rebut his explanations, ordering him to "speak more clearly" and systematically blocking every line of defense. Immediately after the plenum, both men were arrested, tried, and shot in March 1938.
Shkiryatov's method was to work in close coordination with the NKVD (he was reported to maintain a personal prison where he personally interrogated especially important detainees) while always operating through the framework of the party's disciplinary apparatus. Unlike Yezhov or Beria, he was never head of a police agency, and he thereby escaped their fate. His power lay in his control of party membership rolls, personnel files, and the final party judgment on political reliability. He repeated the same pattern in 1939 when his investigative report on Komsomol head Alexander Kosarev led directly to arrest and execution.