Yezhovshchina

Yezhov's tenure

Yezhov was appointed People's Commissar of Internal Affairs in September 1936 as Yagoda's successor. After the Central Committee plenums of February and March 1937 settled on a line of intensified detection, two families of mass operation proceeded under his direction. One was the operation against anti-Soviet elements under order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937, which assigned regional quotas for execution and confinement. The other consisted of the national operations against Poles, Germans, Koreans, and others.

The operations ran on a structure in which the centre assigned quota figures and the regions reported results and requested increases. Those requests were approved centrally, and many documents survive in which Stalin and Politburo members signed the lists of those to be shot.

Yezhov's own fate ended with the operations. He was removed in November 1938, arrested in April 1939, and shot in February 1940, and under his successor Beria a limited review and release in some cases followed.

The politics of the name

Yezhovshchina follows the Russian formation that attaches a period to a person's name. The naming makes it possible to describe the events of 1937 and 1938 as the aberrant conduct of one man, and that is why post-Stalin Soviet accounts adopted the expression.

Khrushchev's secret report of 1956 criticized the cult of Stalin's personality while treating the institutional character of the mass repression only in part, and official discourse afterwards preferred to name the period after individuals such as Yezhov and Beria. The effect was to localize responsibility in the heads of the security agencies.

What the documents show

Research since the archives opened shows the naming cannot be sustained. The setting of quotas, the approval of increases, and the signing of lists are documented at the top of the leadership, and both the launch and the halting of the operations were decided by the Politburo.

At least 680,000 people were shot across the two years. A figure of that order cannot be explained by the discretion of one security chief, and the starting point of research on the period today is that it must be treated as a policy in which the party and state apparatus as a whole took part.