The interrogator of Yezhov: the hand that kept the record as the machine devoured its own master
In 1939 Yezhov — the 'bloody dwarf' whose very name had made the whole country tremble — sat down on the far side of an interrogation record. The hand writing it was Esaulov's.
An NKVD investigator who made his name extracting the confession of the fallen Nikolai Yezhov on Beria's interrogation line. Born to a worker's family in Vyatka and orphaned at ten, he carried out Beria's 'special assignments' alongside Boris Rodos, rose to head the secretariat of the MGB Special Council, and died of natural causes in 1954, escaping the reckoning of the Khrushchev era.
Career Timeline
- 1932–1937Officer, then district chief, in GPU/NKVD organs of the Vyatka–Gorky region
- 1937–1939Graduated the GUGB Central School; operative in the secret-political and counterintelligence departments
- 1939–1940Senior investigator, then deputy head, NKVD Investigative Unit — interrogated Yezhov
- 1940–1941Head of the Investigative Unit of the GUGB NKVD
- 1941–1944Head of the Investigative Unit, NKVD 3rd Directorate; head of the 11th section, NKGB 2nd Directorate
- 1944–1947Deputy people's commissar, later deputy minister, of state security of the Byelorussian SSR; major-general from 1945
- 1947–1952Head of the secretariat of the MGB Special Council; retired January 1952
Related historical events
1939: The Man Who Interrogated Yezhov
On April 10, 1939, Nikolai Yezhov, the face of the Great Terror, was arrested. The 'bloody dwarf' who had run the NKVD from 1936 to 1938 and determined the fate of hundreds of thousands was now himself a prisoner in Lefortovo. The investigation was assigned to the NKVD Investigative Unit, and among the key interrogators was a thirty-four-year-old investigator barely two years out of the Gorky regional organs: Anatoly Esaulov.
Esaulov's signature appears on the interrogation record of August 4, 1939, in which Yezhov admitted that the mass operations of 1937–38 had been used to further an anti-Soviet conspiracy. The former NKVD chief was shot on February 4, 1940. Esaulov's role in the case brought him immediate advancement: he was promoted to deputy head of the NKVD Investigative Unit, and by February 1940 he was its chief.
Beyond the Yezhov case, Esaulov, alongside Boris Rodos, carried out Beria's 'special assignments,' interrogating major political prisoners. When Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech exposed the torture practices of the NKVD Investigative Unit, Rodos was denounced by name. Esaulov, who died of natural causes in 1954, never faced that reckoning.