Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

As for the Soviet population of the mid-1930s, it is necessary to understand how every bond linking one human being to another had been shattered by twenty years of Soviet rule and a decade of Stalinism. Hitler had to negotiate with the Protestant and Catholic churches and even make minor concessions to them over, say, euthanasia for the congenitally ill; he had to soothe, admittedly with no difficulty, the relict ethical scruples of the military, of the business community, the legal and academic professions. Only in the furor of wartime, and by allowing the civil population to pretend that they were not complicit in mass murder, could Hitler proceed to his campaigns of mass extermination.

Stalin had to make no such compromises. The Orthodox Church had been crushed. The Red Army had no coherent code of behavior; it had slaughtered civilians in the civil war and peasants in 1929–32. The intelligentsia was abroad, in prison, or compromised and bribed. There was no communal ethic left alive outside the party. The population had simply to endure each crisis and hope peace and stability would ensue. In 1917–18 they had acquiesced to the Bolshevik coup, in 1926 to the replacement of the collective leadership by a dictator, in 1929 to the enslavement of the peasantry. In 1937–8 effectively every tenth adult male in each city or town would vanish; surely Stalin and the party would then have finished and the survivors, like the Saved in an Anabaptist world, could live in paradise.

The population had incentives to collaborate with its oppressors. If you did not run with the hounds you were a hare to be torn apart by them, and those who disappeared left behind vacant jobs, rooms to live in, clothes, food and drink to be consumed. The terror also hit hardest those between thirty and forty-five in managerial and professional jobs. Like the war against the peasant, the urban terror pitched the young, the dispossessed and unskilled against the middle-aged who had riches and skills. Whether an anonymous slanderer or an arresting NKVD officer, the oppressor often had a personal vendetta or something to gain.

Stalin understood the worst in human nature and motivated his executives and the population accordingly. By installing Nikolai Ezhov, he had acquired the ideal instrument. Undoubtedly, had Ezhov refused to carry out the terror, Stalin would have used Kaganovich or Molotov or his newer acolytes Andreev or Zhdanov instead. But the terror was amplified by Ezhov’s uniquely maniacal compliance and the stimulation that he and Stalin applied to each other. We know a little more today about Ezhov than we did, and he merits a biographical excursion.

How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles

. . . the lion that is the most amenable to the circus trainer’s tricks is the one with the lowest social standing in the pride, the omega animal.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

IN HIS PARTY DOCUMENTS it is repeatedly stated that Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov was born in St. Petersburg on May 1, 1895, that he started work as an apprentice metalworker at the Putilov works in Petersburg in 1906, and was called up by the army in 1913.¹ Ezhov once wrote that he had had only two years’ elementary schooling and had taught himself to read and write. In the 1920s he read so much that he acquired the sobriquet of “Nick the Bookman” (Kol’ka-knizhnik). He was thus literate by the modest standards of Stalin’s Politburo.

Under arrest in 1939, Ezhov said his father, Ivan, was an army bandsman in Lithuania and later ran a Petersburg teahouse of ill repute. ² When Ezhov filled in his party card, he claimed to know some Polish and Lithuanian. Evdokia Babulina-Ezhova, in her sole contribution to our knowledge of her infamous brother, recalled spending holidays in the Suwałki-Mariampol region on the Polish–Lithuanian border. Ezhov’s mother, Anna, was a bandleader’s maid. Ethnically Russian, she had lived in Lithuania.

Possibly, Ezhov was born in 1892 in Suwałki; the only Ivan Ezhov listed in the St. Petersburg directory for 1895 ran a public house. Certainly, Ezhov was wise to invent a wholly Russian and wholly proletarian origin for his career under Stalin. When he took over the NKVD from Iagoda, citizens hoped that a genuine Russian worker would mitigate the fanaticism of the Russophobe Poles and Jews who had run the Cheka and OGPU.

The Nikolai Ezhov of the 1920s is recalled as a considerate, friendly lad. Bukharin’s and Orjonikidze’s widows insisted that their husbands’ executioner was a good man fallen into bad company, a helpless marionette in the hands of a master puppeteer: “You don’t blame the rope for hanging you,” another survivor said. But Ezhov in his forties was Hyde to his younger Jekyll—an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts against his drinking companions, a voracious sexual predator, an active and a passive bisexual, seducing any woman or underage girl he came across— with not a drop of sentiment, loyalty, or remorse.