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

Ezhov’s Russification of the NKVD reflected Stalin’s conversion to Tsarist chauvinism. Operations abroad, already crippled when Stalin in 1936 closed down the NKVD network in Germany to avoid annoying Hitler, became a shambles for they depended on polyglots of Baltic, German, or Jewish origin. Ezhov got rid of Abram Slutsky, the head of the foreign directorate of the NKVD, with a lethal injection as an arrest might have frightened Slutsky’s subordinates into defecting. Ezhov then had Artur Artuzov, his best counterintelligence officer, arrested; he was half-Swiss, half-Estonian, and had lived next door to Iagoda.

Ezhov also homogenized the NKVD’s class structure. Iagoda had employed more white-collar executives; under Ezhov, the workers and peasants took over, a trend that Beria accelerated. Iagoda had used former gentry and petit bourgeois, even a former priest and a Baltic baron; under Ezhov they were almost all purged. Likewise, the educational level of the NKVD’s senior men changed. Those with just elementary schooling still formed 35–40 percent of the personnel (Beria was to reduce this by half by introducing two-year courses in literacy and arithmetic), but Ezhov reduced the proportion of staff with higher education from 15 to 10 percent. Beria then recruited intellectuals, so that over a third of the NKVD’s management had degrees by 1939. These purges meant promoting younger officers and drafting in new staff from Communist Youth and orphanages. Between 1937 and 1939 the average age of senior NKVD men dropped from forty-two to thirty-five. The promotion of youth over age, of Slav over non-Slav, of peasant over white collar reflected Stalin’s bias toward persons with no outside ties and no past.

Those few who held on to their posts in the NKVD cadres after Iagoda’s and Ezhov’s falls were low-fliers: rarely seen at headquarters, they skulked in remote regions. Typical of these lucky few was Dmitri Orlov, in charge of exiled kulaks on the steppes of northern Kazakhstan. NKVD men realized that a summons to Moscow for a posting or an award was in fact a death sentence. Surprisingly few tried to evade their fate. Some committed suicide after a telephone call from Ezhov: for instance, Vasili Karutsky, who had just been promoted to run the Moscow province NKVD, or, at the end of Ezhov’s reign, Daniil Litvin, who had conducted the slaughter of nearly 50,000 in Leningrad during 1938. Some defected, like Genrikh Liushkov, who crossed the Manchurian border in thick fog ostensibly to meet an agent, and then worked for the Japanese until they dispensed with him in 1945. The commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD, Aleksandr Uspensky, faked suicide, adopted a new identity, and raced the length and breadth of European Russia, sheltering with mistresses or old friends for five months, before he was caught outside the left-luggage office at a remote station in the Urals.

Most NKVD men, like Ezhov, drowned fear for their own fates in alcohol and sadism: they hated the innocents who were slow to confess, for the interrogator who failed to secure a statement might follow his prisoner to the executioner. Nobody now called Ezhov “blackberry” or “hedgehog”; the lasting pun on his name was ezhovye rukavitsy, literally “hedgehog-skin gauntlets” or “rod of iron.”

In 1937 Stalin authorized the use of active physical torture and the horrors at the Lubianka were replicated in dozens of provincial centers. ¹⁶ The NKVD archives of Novosibirsk in central Siberia tell a grim story.¹⁷ Novosibirsk was praised by Ezhov as the second most efficient city outside the capital for the numbers of spies, wreckers, and hostile social elements it filtered out of the population—probably some 10 percent of the male adults and adolescents of the area. Many kulaks and Trotskyists had been exiled to Novosibirsk so targets for arrest were easily met. In April 1937 Ezhov sent out one of Iagoda’s men, Lev Mironov, to arrest as many as he could in the army garrisons and railway depots of the region. Two months later, exhausted, Mironov was arrested. Karl Karlson, a Latvian chekist, formerly deputy commissar of the Ukrainian NKVD and ranking second to Ezhov, went to central Siberia in August 1937. By January 1938, he too had been arrested. The experienced Grigori Gorbach replaced Karlson; he lasted less than a year. Gorbach terrified his colleagues: Ezhov had instructed him to find enemies not just in central Siberia but within the Novosibirsk NKVD. ¹⁸ After Gorbach came Major Ivan Maltsev, the most demented of all; he was to die in the camps.