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

We know even less of Ezhov’s first twenty years than we do of Iagoda’s or Menzhinsky’s. Whereas their initiation into mass killing came in the bloodiness of the civil war and revolutionary terror, Ezhov cannot be blamed for many deaths until Stalin in 1936 put him in charge of a machine that slaughtered hundreds of thousands. No doubt Ezhov’s service in the Tsar’s army scarred him deeply, and at the height of his brief reign of terror he still liked to sing, with deep feeling and beautiful intonation, the traditional song of the fatally wounded soldier:

Black raven, black raven,

Why do you spread your talons out

Over my head?

Fly home to my land,

Give this bloodstained cloth

To my young wife.

Tell her she is free . . .

Ezhov, like Iagoda, owed his promotion to talents as a bureaucrat; his revolutionary honors, like Iagoda’s, were minor. He was, it seems, an agitator at the steelworks and later the artillery repair shop where he worked. When revolution came to Vitebsk in Belorussia, with its Russian, Jewish, and Polish populations, Ezhov joined the Red Guard and the Communist Party and helped disarm by bluff a large Polish corps on its way to fight the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.³

From 1919, when Ezhov joined the Red Army, the facts are verifiable. Barely five feet tall and unfit for the front, Ezhov was sent to a radio-telegraphic school in Saratov on the Volga. He became secretary of the garrison Communist Party in Saratov, brushed up his thick auburn hair and wore built-up heels to add to his height. From Saratov, as the Whites approached, Ezhov’s school retreated up the Volga to the Tatar city of Kazan. Despite a reprimand for recruiting deserters into the school, he was promoted, and then in 1921 put in charge of party propaganda in central Kazan. Here Ezhov had to reconcile, under Lenin’s cosmetic multinationalism, the national aspirations of the Tatars with the Muscovite orientation of the Russians.

The latter half of 1921 is a blank in Ezhov’s record. He may have taken part with Malenkov in the Red Army’s suppression of an uprising in Bukhara in October 1921, which would account for his closeness to Malenkov in the mid-1930s. Certainly Ezhov was ill; all his life he had a hacking cough and feverish bouts followed by spells of treatment for tuberculosis. In Kazan Ezhov married Antonina Titova. Like Ezhov’s mother and adopted daughter, she miraculously survived him. She is not known ever to have spoken of her husband. The daughter of a village tailor, she was studying science at Kazan University when the revolution disrupted classes; she found secretarial work in the party. Small but muscular after working in a foundry, Nikolai Ezhov was an appealing suitor. For eight years they seemed a normal couple.

The Kazan party recommended Ezhov to Moscow from where he was sent to Ioshkar-Ola (then Krasnokokshaisk) in the Mari republic on the north Volga, where half the population was Mari, a Finnic people. Ezhov was to allay ethnic tensions. He arrived in March 1922, when the Mari held key appointments in the party and better-educated Russian communists seethed with resentment. The local party boss Ivan Petrov contemptuously called Ezhov in Mari Izi Miklai (Little Nick). Ezhov responded with techniques that later made him formidable: he created a secretariat, staffed with his own men, to usurp Petrov’s power; he reported to Moscow on the “ideological mess” of Petrov’s party organization, uncovered fraud and called in from Moscow a commission to deal with the Mari. Ezhov then raised the stakes: he appointed his wife, Antonina, to manage the party organization and attacked Petrov and Mari “nationalists”: “Petrov has to be reigned in. I enclose documents.” The conflict ended with both Petrov and Ezhov given indefinite leave, but his appeals to Moscow had introduced Ezhov to men of power around Stalin, and Kaganovich had Petrov deported. ⁴ Kaganovich and Ezhov had worked together before the Petrov affair. Kaganovich met Ezhov in 1917 in Vitebsk, where the former was rabble-rousing at the railway workshops. The boyish Ezhov, to Kaganovich’s amazement, was the Vitebsk station commissar.