Nikolai
Yezhov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1895. Just five foot
tall with a crippled leg, Yezhov was nicknamed the "Dwarf".
Yezhov
joined the Bolsheviks after the February
Revolution. He joined the Red Army during
the Civil War and by 1927 was a close
associate of Joseph Stalin.
In September,
1936, Yezhov replaced Genrikh Yagoda as
head of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD).
Yezhov quickly arranged the arrest of all the leading political figures
in the Soviet Union who were critical of Stalin.
The NKVD
broke prisoners down by intense interrogation. This included the threat
to arrest and execute members of the prisoner's family if they did
not confess. The interrogation went on for several days and nights
and eventually they became so exhausted and disoriented that they
signed confessions agreeing that they had been attempting to overthrow
the government.
In 1937
Yezhov arranged the arrest of Genrikh Yagoda,
the former head of the NKVD. He was charged with Nickolai
Bukharin, Alexei
Rykov,
Nikolai
Krestinsky and
Christian
Rakovsky being
involved with Leon Trotsky in a plot
against Joseph Stalin. They were all found
guilty and were eventually executed.
Joseph
Stalin now became suspicious of Yezhov and in December, 1938,
he was replaced by Lavrenti Beria. Nikolai
Yezhov was arrested and was probably executed in 1939.
(1)
Nadezhda Khazina, the wife
of Osip Mandelstam, who died
while in a NKVD labour camp, wrote
about Nikolai Yezhov in her book, Hope Against Hope (1971)
In the period of the Yezhov terror - the mass arrests
came in waves of varying intensity - there must sometimes have been
no more room in the jails, and to those of us still free it looked
as though the highest wave had passed and the terror was abating.
After each show trial, people sighed, "Well, it's all over at
last." What they meant was: "Thank God, it looks as though
I've escaped. But then there would be a new wave, and the same people
would rush to heap abuse on the "enemies of the people."
We first
met Yezhov in the 1930s when Mandelstam and I were staying in a Government
villa in Sukhumi. It is hard to credit that we sat at the same table,
eating, drinking and exchanging small talk with this man who was to
be one of the great killers of our time, and who totally exposed -
not in theory but in practice - all the assumptions on which our "humanism"
rested.
Yezhov
had a limp, and I remember Podvoiski, who liked to lecture people
about the qualities of a true Bolshevik, scolding me for my laziness
and telling me to follow the example of Yezhov who danced the gopak
despite his lame leg.
Yezhov
was a modest and rather agreeable person. He was not yet used to being
driven about in an automobile and did not therefore regard it as an
exclusive privilege to which no ordinary mortal could lay claim. We
sometimes asked him to get him to get a lift into town, and he never
refused.
(2)
Victor Serge, was a close friend
of Boris Pilnyak in the early 1930s.
He wrote about him and Nikolai Yezhov in his book Memoirs of a
Revolutionary (1945)
Boris Pilnyak was writing The Volga Flows into the
Caspian Sea. On his work-table I saw manuscripts under revision.
It had been suggested to him that, to avoid banishment from Soviet
literature, he should remodel Forest of the Isles, that 'counter-revolutionary'
tale of his, into a novel agreeable to the Central Committee. The
body's Cultural Section had assigned him a co-author who, page by
page, would ask him to suppress this and add that. The helpmate's
name was Yezhov, and a high career awaited him, followed by a violent
death: this was the successor to Yagoda as head of the GPU.
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