Titans of History

In 1934 the assassination of Stalin’s closest henchman, Sergei Kirov, allowed him to unleash the Great Terror against “enemies of the people,” real and imagined. In 1935 Stalin gave Yezhov special responsibility for supervising the NKVD, the secret police. The chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, was out of favor; Yezhov aimed to destroy him and take his place. But Yezhov’s first task was to take over the case against Stalin’s former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov supervised their interrogations, threatening to kill their families, turning up the heating in their cells in midsummer—but also promising them their lives if they confessed to absurd crimes at the first show trial. They finally agreed. The show trial, staged in 1936, was a success, but despite Yezhov’s promises, Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in his presence. Yagoda had the bullets dug out of their brains so he could keep them in his desk; later Yezhov found the bullets, and kept them in his own drawer. In September 1936 Stalin sacked Yagoda and promoted Yezhov to people’s commissar of internal affairs (NKVD).

As Yezhov supervised the spread of the Terror, arresting ever-larger circles of suspects to be tortured into confessing imaginary crimes, the Soviet press worked the population up into a frenzy of witch-hunting against Trotskyite spies and terrorists. Yezhov claimed that Yagoda had tried to kill him by spraying his curtains with cyanide. He then arrested most of Yagoda’s officers and had them shot. Then he arrested Yagoda himself. “Better that ten innocent men should suffer than one spy get away,” Yezhov announced. “When you chop wood, chips fly!”

On Stalin’s orders, in May 1937 Yezhov arrested Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most talented Red Army officer, together with many other top generals. The idea was to break the independent power of the army, but the generals had to confess to convince the other Soviet leaders that they were guilty of crimes against the state. Yezhov personally supervised their savage torture: when Tukhachevsky’s confession was found in the archives in the 1990s it was covered in a brown spray that was found to be the blood spatter of a human body in motion. The generals were all shot in Yezhov’s presence. Stalin, who never attended torture sessions or executions, questioned him on their conduct at the final moment. In all, some 40,000 officers were shot.

Yezhov now expanded the Terror in a bizarre way, clearly on Stalin’s orders, by initiating random killing by numbers, giving each city and region a quota of two categories: category one was to be shot and category two to be exiled. These quotas constantly expanded, until approximately a million were shot and many millions more deported to hellish labor camps in Siberia. Wives of the more prominent victims were arrested and usually shot too. Children between the ages of one and three were to be confined to orphanages, but children older than that could be shot. “Beat, destroy without sorting out,” Yezhov ordered, adding, “Better too far than not far enough.”

By 1938 the Soviet Union was in a turmoil of fear and killing, all supervised by Yezhov. Stalin kept a low profile, but Yezhov was now everywhere, hailed as the hero-avenger of a society in which enemies were omnipresent. He was now almost as powerful as Stalin, worshipped in poems and songs, with towns named in his honor. Yezhov devised special execution chambers at Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka Prison and elsewhere; the chambers had a sloping concrete floor like an abattoir, wooden walls to absorb bullets and hoses to wash away the blood.

But by now Yezhov was cracking up and losing control. He constantly toured the country arresting and killing; he worked all night, torturing suspects and drinking heavily; he was becoming more and more paranoid, fearing that at any moment Stalin would turn against him. He had many of his close friends, ex-girlfriends and his own godfather shot. The stress ate at him: he boasted drunkenly that he ruled the country, he could arrest Stalin. As the third show trial starring Bukharin and Yagoda opened in Moscow, even Stalin became alarmed by the uncontrolled nature of the Terror he had unleashed. It had served its purpose, and now he needed a scapegoat. Stalin was hearing about Yezhov’s excesses, drunkenness, debauchery and boasting. He ordered Yezhov to kill his top lieutenants, including his deputy, who was chloroformed in Yezhov’s own office and then injected with poison. As he felt Stalin’s disapproval, Yezhov started to kill anyone who could incriminate him—a thousand were killed in five days without Stalin’s permission.