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

Voroshilov, who had caught the change in Stalin’s mood, began talking of the NKVD as forcing everyone, regardless of guilt, to confess. Within the NKVD Ezhov had shot by August any subordinates who might testify against him, even his staunchest henchmen Zakovsky of Leningrad and Lev Mironov of Siberia, while Stalin was disposing of others—launching Frinovsky, too, into water as commissar for the navy. Like Iagoda before him, Ezhov seemed to take no steps to avert his fate. He had even fewer options than Iagoda: there was nobody left alive with whom he could have plotted a coup, there were no old Bolsheviks to whom he could gravitate. His own Cheka feared and hated him; Ezhov had murdered his own appointees, not to mention the old guard. He was alone except for a few old companions with whom he could seek solace in vodka and sodomy. The only person he still loved was his eight-year-old foster daughter, and she could hardly have comforted or advised him.

On August 22 Stalin appointed Lavrenti Beria, who was already boss of Georgia and de facto NKVD satrap for all Transcaucasia, head of the NKVD directorate of state security. Now that Lominadze and Orjonikidze were dead, Stalin had in Moscow no close ally to whom he could speak privately in Georgian. He had watched and promoted Lavrenti Beria for nearly fifteen years and had groomed him to succeed Ezhov, just as Ezhov had been chosen to replace Iagoda.

Beria finished his purges in Georgia in September 1938 and handed over the remnants of the Georgian party and intelligentsia to the easier-going Kandid Charkviani and its NKVD to Akvsenti Rapava, a Mingrelian cobbler’s son who had crushed Abkhazia after Lakoba’s murder. He then came to Moscow and saw Ezhov straightaway; their affable relationship in Lakoba’s villa six years before now became a standoff. Beria had brought his NKVD men from Georgia, figures as vile as Ezhov’s. Without Beria’s countersignature, Ezhov could issue no orders. Holed up in his dacha with wife, daughter and nanny, Ezhov was now drinking too heavily to counterattack. From September 1938 Ezhov’s remaining associates fell victim to Beria. On Red Square on November 7 Beria stood in Ezhov’s place. The faked suicide and flight of Aleksandr Uspensky that same month was another nail in the Ezhov coffin.

Winding up the terror was presented to the public as redressing the balance between Andrei Vyshinsky’s law-abiding judiciary and the lawless NKVD. Ezhov had unsettling meetings at the Kremlin and in his own office with both the scheming Vyshinsky and the crusading Sholokhov. These discussions led on November 17 to a resolution, “On Arrests, Procuracy Supervision, and Conduct of Investigation,” as a result of which the NKVD was no longer prosecutor, judge, and executioner. In theory if not practice the NKVD would arrest, they would torture, and they would execute; Vyshinsky’s organs now took over the intermediate processes of indictment and trial. Local troikas lost their right to shoot prisoners. The Politburo disavowed their own “unfounded arrests” as the work of “foreign spies and enemies of the people.”

Both Ezhovs were desperate. Evgenia had been mentally ill since May and had rarely left the dacha. Ezhov challenged her about her affairs with Sholokhov and Babel. Ignoring his own sexual intercourse with her friends and their daughters, with his subordinates and their wives, he decided to divorce her. She appealed to Stalin on September 19, 1938, to reconcile her husband to her. Ezhov abandoned divorce proceedings but shot both of his wife’s previous husbands, her closest confidante’s husband, and her former boss.

On October 29 Evgenia was sent to a sanatorium. She left a note at home: “Darling Kolia. I beg you, I insist you have all my life checked out. I can’t reconcile myself to the thought that I am suspected of two-faced behavior and crimes I have not committed.” She again appealed to Stalin: “Dear, beloved Comrade Stalin, I may be calumnied, slandered, but you are dear and close to me. . . . Let my freedom, my life be taken, I won’t object, but I shan’t give up my right to love you. . . . I feel I am a living corpse. . . .” On November 21, she died of an overdose of sleeping tablets which she had asked Ezhov to bring her. Ezhov’s oldest friend and long-standing lover, Vladimir Konstantinov, later testified that Ezhov had said, “I had to sacrifice her to save myself.”