Popok was born in
Khislavichi,
Mstislavl district,
Mogilev province (now
Smolensk region) into a bourgeois family. He worked as a laborer and office worker in
Mariupol,
Yekaterinoslav,
Tambov,
Yelets, and
Smolensk. He joined the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1909. He was arrested twice, was in exile from 1911 to 1914, then served in the
Imperial Russian Army from 1915 to 1917, during which he conducted revolutionary agitation among his fellow soldiers. From November 1917 to July 1918 he was the head of the fuel department of the
Moscow executive committee. In November 1918 he served as head of the Yekaterinoslav provincial labor department, as part of the People's Commissariat of Labor of Ukraine. From 1919 to February 1921 he served in the
Red Army, where he was head of the political department for several military groupings. He took part in battles on the Eastern and Southern fronts of the Civil War. From 1921 to 1922 he was head of the organizational department of the
Pskov provincial committee of the RCP(b) and chairman of the Pskov and
Bryansk provincial trade union councils. In 1924 he graduated from the Marxism Courses at the
Communist Academy,
Moscow. Popok held a number of posts across
Russia during the next fourteen years, from
Zlatoust in the south to
Amur and
Chita in the east. From 1930 to 1937 he was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Turkmenistan, then briefly First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the
Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic for part of 1937 and 1938. He also served as a member of the All-Union Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR for this period. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935. On April 21, 1938, by decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), he was removed from office and recalled to the disposal of the Central Committee. He was soon (possibly on the same day) arrested, then shot on July 28, 1938. He was posthumously
rehabilitated in the years following Stalin's death. ==References==