Alexander Vladimirovich Eiduk

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Alexander Wladimirowitsch Eiduk (* 1886 in Odziena , Livonia Governorate , Russian Empire  ; † August 28, 1938 in Kommunarka near Moscow, Soviet Union ) was a Latvian , Bolshevik revolutionary and member of the Soviet secret police Cheka , GPU and NKVD . In 1938 he became a victim of the Stalin "purges" .

Life

Eiduk joined the RSDLP (B) as early as 1903 , making him one of the oldest veterans of the ruling party of the Soviet Union. After the revolution of 1905 he went into exile.

In 1918, Alexander Eiduk was an officer in the Kremlin Guard and later joined the Cheka. The dedication he showed during the Russian Revolution made him a celebrated hero. On the other hand, at a hearing before the United States Congress in the same year, along with Jakow Peters, the American diplomat Roger E. Simmons described him as the “most bloodthirsty monster in Russia”. Simmons himself had been briefly detained in a prison car. This was coupled to Eiduk's private train, which included a wagon that had once been set up for Tsar Nicholas II and in which Eiduk now lived. Eiduk belonged to the management of the Cheka and was known as "the executioner". He had carried out the executions of many White Army officers with his own gun. Unlike the intellectual party leaders in the three-part suit, he belonged to the leather jacket ruffians. From June 1919 he was chairman of the Central Agency for Prisoners of War (Centroplenbeš), which was called Central Administration for the Evacuation of the Population (Centroévaka) from the following year.

The Russian famine of 1921 led to the arrival of people from foreign aid organizations, to whom Alexander Eiduk was presented after Johann Palmer was replaced as authorized representative of the Russian government. His role was that of a police officer and, to the chagrin of the American Relief Administration (ARA), he and his extensive staff took up rooms in their Moscow headquarters (30 Spridonovka Street). He ordered the ARA and its Russian employees to be closely monitored. In the upper administrative level, he himself had no experience or skills. But he valued functioning processes and made his contribution by paving the way for the ARA through the Soviet bureaucracy.

A crisis in the cooperation with the ARA soon arose because the Soviet government had a greater interest in the transport of seeds, while the ARA wanted to deliver food first in order to prevent the seeds from being consumed. Eiduk said his people had everything under control, but 1,100 wagon loads of corn were stuck at the Balashov railway junction - the ARA threatened to abort the relief operation. Kamenev then asked for a conference, Eiduk was shown the right way and the People's Commissar for Transport, Feliks Dzierżyński himself, had to solve the transport problem by providing wagons. Eiduk was replaced by Karl Lander as authorized representative for the ARA.

For Eiduk, the contact with the ARA also led to the acquaintance of Willi Munzenberg, who was entrusted with the task of remedying the "bad impression" that the Soviets' success with foreign aid had made. Babette Gross described an incident from the summer of 1933 in her Münzenberg biography when she was chauffeured with him and Eiduk to the vicinity of Schelkowo to visit the construction site of a section of the Moskva-Volga Canal - with workers from a camp managed by Eiduk . What happened to the people was painful to watch for the propagandist, who became more and more quiet, “while Eiduck, the old Bolshevik, the honored civil war fighter who had advanced to become a concentration camp overseer” proudly showed them his camp.

In 1938, Alexander Eiduk was executed as part of the Latvian Operation of Great Terror . In 1956 Eiduk was legally rehabilitated.

Fonts

  • The Russian famine of 1921–1922 and how to combat it in the light of the facts . Association of international publishing houses, Berlin 1922.

literature

  • Jörn Happel : The East Expert. Gustav Hilger - Diplomat in the Age of Extreme , Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Leiden et al. 2018, ISBN 978-3-506-78609-8
  • WA Goncharov, AI Kokurin (Ed.): Guardsmen of October. The role of the peoples of the Baltic states in the establishment and strengthening of the Bolshevik regime. Indrik, Moscow 2009, ISBN 978-5-91674-014-1 (Russian)
  • Bertrand M. Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2002, ISBN 0-8047-4493-9
  • Stephen Koch: Double Lives. Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West. The Free Press, New York et al. 1993, ISBN 978-0029187302
  • Benjamin Murry Weissman: Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia. 1921-1923. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford 1974, ISBN 0-8179-1341-6
  • Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1967
  • Douglas Smith: The Russian Job. The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Famine , Picador, London 2019, ISBN 978-1-5098-8289-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Эйдук Александр Владимирович (1886) , accessed December 10, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b Goncharov, Kokurin: Oktobergardisten . , Pp. 453-454
  3. ^ A b Smith: The Russian Job , p. 60.
  4. ^ Large: Willi Munzenberg. , P. 133.
  5. ↑ a b Weissman: Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia. , P. 80.
  6. ^ RE Simmons and WW Welsh Tell Senators of Brutalities of Bolsheviki . In: The New York Times , February 16, 1919. Retrieved December 7, 2019. 
  7. ↑ a b Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. , P. 109 f.
  8. ↑ a b Happel: The East Expert. , P. 419.
  9. ^ Benjamin Murry Weissman: Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia . Stanford 1974, p. 81.
  10. ^ Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. , P. 154 f.
  11. ^ Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. , S. 159.
  12. ^ Patenaude: The Big Show in Bololand. , P. 161.
  13. ^ Weissman: Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia . P. 118.
  14. ↑ Koch: Double Lives. , P. 25
  15. ^ Large: Willi Munzenberg. , P. 272 ​​f.
personal data
SURNAME Eiduk, Alexander Vladimirovich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet revolutionary of Latvian origin
DATE OF BIRTH 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Odziena
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1938
Place of death Kommunarka near Moscow, Soviet Union