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

In autumn 1936 Ezhov first had to complete Iagoda’s tasks: to prepare two show trials, which would dispose of those, first on the left, then on the right, implicated at the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev. To make the NKVD do as Ezhov wished it was to be purged; the hangmen themselves were first in line for the gallows. Each previous new leader had made a smooth transition. Even when Iagoda took over from Menzhinsky, quarreling with many who disliked his “sergeant-major” rudeness, OGPU-NKVD had remained cohesive. On that occasion Stalin had removed only a handful—Stanisław Messing, Meer Trilisser— whom he either disliked or needed for other work.¹⁴ Just a few—Efim Evdokimov, Iakov Agranov—genuinely objected to Iagoda’s style. They disliked the fabrications in the early 1930s not because they found them distasteful; they wanted more sophisticated methods of falsification.

Ezhov laid waste the NKVD, as he would the party, the army, the intelligentsia, and the urban population. He first removed the most prominent—sometimes letting them stew for a few months in provincial demotion. The moment Ezhov took over, a chief of the secret political directorate, I. V. Shtein, killed himself. After Iagoda’s arrest, Gleb Bokii, the terror of Petrograd and Turkestan, was seized. Georgi Molchanov, Iagoda’s head of the secret political directorate, was arrested a month before Iagoda and shot “by special arrangements,” in other words without formal interrogation or sentence, after violent questioning from his colleagues Nikolai Nikolaev-Zhurid, the Latvian Ans Zalpeter, and Sergei Zhupakhin, the axman of Vologda, who would themselves soon follow their victim. Molchanov, a handsome man, was beaten into a shadow of his former self and must have found execution a relief. One of Stalin’s candidates for Iagoda’s post, Vsevolod Balitsky, was shot by Ezhov as a Polish spy.

Neither his acumen, nor having Stalin as his neighbor at Zubalovo, nor helping to topple Iagoda, saved Iakov Agranov. He helped Ezhov settle in, prepared Radek and Piatakov for trial, and after three transfers in seven months was arrested in July 1937. Agranov was tormented for over a year before being shot. Efim Evdokimov, whom Stalin had proposed to Ezhov as the interrogator of Iagoda, was also ill rewarded: in May 1938 he was transferred to the Commissariat of Water Transport, which had now become death row for chekisty. Soon Lavrenti Beria would exterminate Efim Evdokimov and all the north Caucasus men who owed their careers to him. Iagoda’s head of the Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) NKVD, Matvei Pogrebinsky, shot himself when Iagoda was arrested; a few days later I. I. Chertok, Iagoda’s deputy head of counterespionage, jumped to his death. Even one of Ezhov’s favorites, Commissar of State Security third rank Vladimir Kursky, who took over from Georgi Molchanov, killed himself on July 8, 1937; the last straw for him was the order to interrogate and dispatch Zinaida Glikina, Ezhov’s unwanted mistress. The last aristocrat in the NKVD, Pillar von Pilchau, was arrested as a Polish spy. Of Iagoda’s 110 most senior men, ninety were arrested by Ezhov. Most perished. Ezhov arrested 2,273 chekisty at all levels and, by his own count, dismissed another 11,000.

The NKVD purge first hit non-Russians. Jews and those who had affiliations with Germany and with the so-called limitroph countries, Poland, Romania, the Baltic states—countries where communists could expect no protection—were marked men. The NKVD paid heavily for its cosmopolitanism. In recent years only two senior NKVD officers, Bliumkin and his friend Rabinovich, had been shot; many non-Russian chekisty had voluntarily or involuntarily changed careers. In vain: every famous Latvian—such as Peterss—and Pole—such as Messing and Unszlicht—in the economy or in cultural life followed their former colleagues into oblivion.

Rank and file NKVD men were dismissed or transferred; arrest and shooting were largely reserved for senior staff. Fear spread through the service. The new NKVD—Beria would finish what Ezhov began— would look very different. On October 1, 1936, of the 110 senior operatives, only 42 were Russians, Ukrainians, or Belorussians; 43 declared themselves Jews, there were nine Latvians, five Poles, and two Germans. By September 1938, just before Ezhov fell, senior staff had increased to 150, but Russians predominated with 98; there were no Latvians and only one Pole, while Jews had diminished to 32. A year later, under Beria, there were 122 Russians and only six Jews. The only significant non-Slavs were Beria’s 12 Georgians.¹⁵