YEZHOV, NIKOLAI (1895–1940)

Soviet politician.

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was born in Marijampole, Lithuania, the extremely short son of simple parents. Without finishing primary school, he was apprenticed to a tailor, later becoming an industrial worker in the Russian capital, Petrograd, and a soldier after the outbreak of World War I. Following the October Revolution of 1917, he started a career in the Red Army and then the Communist Party. During the 1920s he was party secretary in Mari Province and Kazakhstan before being transferred to Moscow in 1927, where he became involved in personnel policy for the Party Central Committee and then the People's Commissariat of Agriculture. In 1930 he was promoted to chief of the Central Committee personnel department. In 1934 he became a Central Committee member and chief of the Party Control Commission.

As a result of a strikingly fast career, in 1935 Yezhov was appointed secretary of the Central Committee, one of the party's top functions, in order to supervise the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in charge of state security. In addition, on party leader Joseph Stalin's instructions, he carried out a purge of the party apparatus. From 1936 on, he took part in organizing major show trials against prominent former party members. In September 1936 Stalin made him people's commissar of internal affairs, or state security chief. In this position Yezhov organized the Great Terror. First the NKVD was purged; his predecessor Genrikh Yagoda was liquidated, together with a large number of his subordinates. Then followed mass arrests within the party.

The culmination of the Great Terror was the so-called mass operations, aimed at eliminating people thought insufficiently loyal and supposed spies. On 30 July 1937, under instructions from Stalin and the Politburo, Yezhov signed Order 00447, commissioning the arrest of almost 270,000 "former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements" (a broad enough definition to include anybody deemed a security risk by the party elite or the NKVD); some 76,000 of them were immediately to be shot, the rest to be sent to the gulag concentration camps. They were to be sentenced by "troikas," administrative triumvirates who were given quotas of arrests and executions that could be raised on request.

Foreigners were another target of Yezhov's mass operations, especially those belonging to nationalities of neighboring countries, such as Poles, Germans, Latvians, and Finns. All in all, during fifteen months (August 1937–November 1938) more than 1.5 million people were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary and other crimes against the state; almost 700,000 of them were shot. On Yezhov's instructions, and with his personal participation, they were tortured in order to make them confess to their supposed crimes.

Praise from Stalin and other party leaders indicates that Yezhov did not act of his own accord. This is corroborated by his continued promotion. In October 1937 he was made a Politburo candidate member, possibly only pro forma, as in April he had already been included in the day-to-day leading body of five. Moreover, in addition to his other functions, in April 1938 he was appointed people's commissar of water transportation.

Although at the time this was unclear, the last promotion in fact initiated his downfall. Stalin had become suspicious of his powerful and ardent state security chief, questioning his loyalty. In August he made Lavrenty Beria Yezhov's deputy; Yezhov rightly understood that the Georgian was his intended successor. After sharp criticism, in November 1938 he resigned as NKVD chief, although for the time being he was allowed to keep his other functions. One after the other, the people around him were arrested. His wife, Yevgeniya, felt the net closing around them and committed suicide with her husband's help. Accustomed to solid drinking, under these circumstances Yezhov became a real alcoholic.

In April 1939 he was arrested. Under torture, he confessed to having committed espionage and sabotage and to being guilty of conspiracy and terrorism. The charge of "sodomy" referred to his homosexual contacts. On 2 February 1940, in a Stalinist procedure of summary justice, he was sentenced to death, to be shot the following night.

After his fall, for many years Yezhov was completely ignored. Then, during the 1950s, the destalinization campaign give birth to the myth of the Yezhovshchina ("the time of Yezhov"), suggesting that Yezhov, together with a handful of others, had organized the Terror, so to speak, over the head of the party. At the same time, the real character and extent of the Terror were kept secret, as was Yezhov's biography. These facts became known only from the 1990s on, after the fall of communism. It became clear that, indeed, Yezhov should be held responsible for the Terror, but also that he acted in full accordance with the instructions of Stalin, who dismissed him when he did not need him anymore.

See alsoPurges; Stalin, Joseph; Terror.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Translated by Benjamin Sher. New Haven, Conn., 1999.

Jansen, Marc, and Nikita Petrov. Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940. Stanford, Calif., 2002.

Khlevnyuk, Oleg. "The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938." In Soviet History, 1917–53: Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies, edited by Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie, and E. A. Rees, 158–176. Basingstoke, U.K., 1995.

Marc Jansen