Iakov Abramovich Popok

Born Sept. 20 (Oct. 2), 1892, in Khislavichi, now in Smolensk Oblast; died July 28, 1938. Soviet party official. Member of the Communist Party from 1909.

Popok was born into a petit bourgeois family. He engaged in party work in the Ukraine, was repeatedly arrested, and was in exile from 1911 to 1914. Drafted into the army in 1915, he conducted revolutionary agitation among the soldiers. He was chairman of the Khislavichi committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917. After the October Revolution of 1917, Popok became chairman of the Kalachinsk district committee of the party and then worked in the Moscow soviet. From 1919 to 1921 he was chief of the political section of the Second Cavalry Army and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Northern Caucasus Military District. He served as chairman of the provincial trade union councils in Pskov and Briansk in 1921–22.

Popok studied at the Communist Academy from 1922 to 1924. After serving from 1924 to 1929 as secretary of the Zlatoust, Amur, and Chita okrug committees of the party, he worked in 1929 in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). From 1930 to 1937, Popok was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Turkmenistan, and from 1937, secretary of the oblast committee of the ACP(B) of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He was a delegate to the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B). Popok was elected a member of the Central Auditing Commission at the Seventeenth Congress. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a deputy to the first convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded the Order of Lenin.