He was a poet, a Russian White Army Officer, anti-Communist, and the husband of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, noted Russian poet. He was one of the youngest of nine children born to Elizaveta Durnovo and Yakov Konstantinovich Efron, he diagnosed with tuberculosis as a child. His father was born Jewish but converted to Protestant to marry; his mother was Russian nobility. Politically, both were revolutionaries with members of the family being arrested and their home being commonly searched by authorities. Within a year of his father's death and shortly after a brother's suicide, his mother, facing a life-sentence in prison, committed suicide. Along with his chronic childhood disease, this disturbing event marked his ability to achieve his goals throughout the rest of his life. He attended Moscow University for a time. While being a 17-year-old cadet in the officers' military academy, he met his future wife, the beautiful and educated Marina. They married in January 1912, soon had a family of two daughters and later a son. Although he is credited as being a poet like his wife, none of his poems survived to be read today. His first book of short stories was dedicated to his wife. His military life was a strain on their marriage. While he was away on fighting on the front, his wife and daughters were trapped for five years in Moscow experiencing Russian famine of 1921 to 1922; the youngest of his daughters died of starvation. The toil of this experience worn on his wife's beauty and mental status. Not only was there no food, but no fuel for heat during the freezing Russian winters. After the Red Army's victory and Communist came to rule, he, a White Army officer, escaped to Berlin, Germany, and in May 1922 he was reunited with his wife and daughter. By August 1922, they had traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia where he started studying politics and sociology at the Charles University in hope of earning his doctorate, but never finished. The family was living in poverty, he lived in the city near the university while his wife and daughter in a nearby village. After living in Czechoslovakia for three years, a son was born to them. As his health continued to decline, his daughter became his caregiver as well as her brother's. In 1925, the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14 years. There he wrote, was a film maker and even an actor. His wife was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He became homesick for Russia but was afraid to return because of his prior anti-Communist activities with the White Army. He restored his Russian citizenship in 1931. He was recruited to be spy by the Soviet Union authorities, a group that were the forerunner the KGB. In 1937 ignoring reports of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge with thousands of executions, Ariadna, his daughter, returned to the Soviet Union and he soon followed using the surname of "Andreev". In September 1937, the French police implicated him in the murder of the former Soviet agent and defector in Switzerland. Still living in Paris, his wife was questioned by authorities about the murder; she knew nothing. On December 10, 1937, he was arrested and placed on house arrest. Later, it was learned that not only was he associated with the Switzerland murder but although not physically in Paris on the actual day, he was implicated in the assassination of Marxist leader Leon Trotsky's son Lev Sedov in 1936 in Paris. He and his daughter, Ariadna. were arrested for espionage after her fiancé provided evidence as a government informant. In 1939, his wife and son came to Russia becoming instant suspects of the government. Both he and his daughter were physically tortured during their interrogation; his daughter finally broke and confessed that he was a spy which this led to his execution by military tribunal. This time, Ariadna served over eight years in prison and later published her memoirs. Both were exonerated after Josef Stalin's death. Before Efron's death and with the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Tsvetaeva evacuated to the remote eastern village of Yelabuga, found herself penniless again, isolated from her literature colleagues, banned from writing to earn money, thus hung herself on August 31, 1941 after being solicited, according to her son's diary, to become a Russian spy. Their son Georgii enlisted in the Soviet Army and was killed in the World War II.