Ivan Nikolayevich Dementiev

Soviet Union state institutions Marxism–Leninism ?–?

Leningrad factory guard whom Yezhov, in his 1939 confession and interrogation, named as an old friend, lover and recruited terrorist

When, in late April 1939, he began to give evidence on his relations with Yezhov, the investigator cut him short: 'That is of little interest to us. You are concealing your main enemy activity that you have undertaken on Ezhov's instigation.'

An old friend of Nikolai Yezhov. In his statement of 24 April 1939 Yezhov stated that Dementiev had gone with him to Semipalatinsk in 1924, that in the autumn of 1938, after Yezhov's dismissal, he lived about two months in Yezhov's Moscow apartment, and that the two had sexual relations. That autumn he carried fruit, a gnome statuette and a large quantity of luminal from Yezhov to Yevgenia Yezhova in her sanatorium and brought back her farewell note. In the interrogation of 26 April Yezhov stated that he had prepared Dementiev, assistant chief of the guard at the Svetoch factory in Leningrad, as a terrorist. He was arrested no later than April 1939; his later fate is unconfirmed, and one account says he was sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment.

Also known as: Ivan Dementyev