Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov

Yezhov’s path to the NKVD did not begin inside the security police. After serving as party secretary in the Mari region in 1922 and Semipalatinsk in 1923–1924, he worked in the Kazakh regional committee and was recruited in 1927 as an instructor in the Central Committee’s Organization and Assignment Department. By 1930 he headed the department responsible for administrative, economic, and trade-union cadres, overseeing personnel placement and vetting across the party-state apparatus.

After participating in the central party purge commission of 1933–1934, Yezhov became a Central Committee and Orgburo member in 1934, then a Central Committee secretary, chairman of the Party Control Commission, and head of the Leading Party Organs Department in 1935. He supervised investigations following the Kirov assassination and the so-called Kremlin affair, helping connect former oppositionists to security cases. His appointment to replace Yagoda as NKVD chief in September 1936 was therefore not an abrupt outside recruitment but an extension of his work in classification, surveillance, and discipline. That trajectory shows how the Great Terror joined the party personnel apparatus to the state security machinery.

On July 30, 1937, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov signed Politburo Order No. 00447. The document divided 'former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements' into Category One (summary execution) and Category Two (ten-year Gulag terms), assigning round-number quotas to each region and republic: Moscow region 35,000 (5,000 to be shot), Leningrad 14,000 (4,000 shot), Ukraine 28,800 (8,000 shot): a national total of 269,100. This was only the beginning. Regional party and NKVD bosses, eager to demonstrate zeal, immediately petitioned for quota increases. Stalin and Yezhov complied through Politburo resolutions: an additional 120,000 (63,000 shot) on October 15, 1937; another 57,200 (48,000 shot) on January 31, 1938.

Simultaneously, the 'national operations' unfolded. NKVD Order No. 00485 targeted Poles, expanding to Germans, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, and other borderland minorities. These populations were designated as a potential 'fifth column' for a coming war and subjected to preemptive elimination. Arrests, torture, and confession-extraction were organized on an industrial scale. Investigators had prisoners sign blank pages; the typed confession, a scenario reviewed by commanding officers, was filled in afterward. Inside the NKVD, this was referred to as the 'spare parts' system.

On November 17, 1938, Stalin and the Politburo halted the mass operations. The 15-month Kulak Operation alone had produced approximately 767,000 convictions and 387,000 executions. Combined with the national operations, camp executions, and unreported 'supplementary executions,' the total toll was far higher. The Terror had expanded to the point of threatening the state's own functioning. And now the executor himself had become a liability.

As early as August 1938, Lavrentiy Beria was appointed Yezhov's NKVD deputy, beginning the de facto removal. On November 25, 1938, Yezhov was formally dismissed and shunted to the minor post of Commissar for Water Transport. Arrested on April 10, 1939, he was shot on February 4, 1940, in an NKVD basement execution chamber built to his own specifications. After death, his image was airbrushed out of photographs beside Stalin, and the very term 'Yezhovshchina' was erased from official discourse.

The essence of the Yezhovshchina is not individual 'madness' but the extreme case of a mechanism through which a system produces an executor, achieves its objective, then shifts all responsibility onto that individual and discards him, a complicity of the entire collective leadership.

Yezhov's effective removal began in August 1938 when Lavrentiy Beria was appointed his NKVD deputy. On 23 November 1938 he petitioned the Politburo for resignation, accepting blame for 'wrecking by enemies who infiltrated the NKVD' while insisting that 'under the Central Committee's leadership the NKVD smashed the enemies soundly.' He begged Stalin: 'Do not touch my 70-year-old mother.' He was officially dismissed on 25 November.

Arrested on 10 April 1939 in the presence of Beria and Malenkov, Yezhov was held at the Sukhanovka special prison. Under torture he confessed to espionage, terrorism, and preparing an anti-Soviet coup, but at his closed military trial on 2 February 1940 he recanted all political charges, declaring he preferred 'death to telling lies.' His final statement exposes the mechanism by which the Stalinist system consumed its own executor: 'Tell Stalin that I have never in my political life deceived the Party, and that I shall die with his name on my lips.'

After sentencing, Yezhov appealed for clemency but was immediately denied. He was shot on 4 February (or 6 February) 1940 in an NKVD basement execution chamber built to his own specifications; his ashes were buried in a common grave at Donskoye Cemetery. In 1998 the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court denied Yezhov's rehabilitation on the grounds that he was a direct perpetrator of mass repression, a ruling that set a legal precedent for attributing responsibility for collective state violence to individual executors.

The full Korean translation of Aleksei Pavlyukov's biography Yezhov (2007) is available as a separate document. Its four parts follow Yezhov from his childhood and service in the imperial army through his rise in the party's personnel apparatus, his years as NKVD chief, and his fall and execution.

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