Titans of History

“I may be small in stature,” Yezhov once said, “but my hands are strong—Stalin’s hands!” Yezhov was so tiny—just 5 feet (151 cm) tall—that as a young man he had been rejected by the tsarist army. He was also unstable, sickly, sexually confused, frail and skinny, but at the same time jovial, hard-drinking and possessed of a puerile sense of humor (including a taste for farting competitions). With his handsome face, blue eyes and thick dark hair, and his fondness for dancing, singing and playing the guitar, he was a popular figure, especially with women—although, unusually for the Soviet leadership, he was promiscuously bisexual.

His first wife was a party comrade called Antonina, whom he divorced to marry a glamorous and promiscuous Jewish woman named Yevgenia, who held a salon for writers and film stars. At the time of Yezhov’s downfall, his successor Beria began to investigate Yevgenia’s sexually adventurous antics. Yezhov tried to divorce her in time, probably to save her and their adopted daughter Natasha, but possibly to save himself too. All her lovers, including the brilliant writer Isaac Babel, were arrested and shot. Yevgenia committed suicide.

In the autumn of 1938 Stalin promoted another protégé, Lavrenti Beria, to become Yezhov’s deputy. In October the politburo denounced the management of the NKVD.

In November Yezhov appeared for the last time for the annual parade on Lenin’s Mausoleum. He was sacked from the NKVD on November 23, though he remained officially commissar of water transport. But he barely turned up for work, instead losing himself in a series of drunken homosexual orgies, waiting for the knock on the door. When it came, and the inevitable trial and death sentence followed, Yezhov collapsed. On the way to the execution chamber he himself had designed, he wept, got hiccups and fell to the floor. He had to be dragged to his death.

Yezhov was a typical half-educated but diligently ambitious Soviet bureaucrat, but finding himself with an almost absolute fiat over life and death, empowered by Stalin himself, he reveled in the hunt, the details of administering murder and the slaughter itself, and personally spent nights torturing his victims. Stalin’s “Bloody Dwarf” became the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union, but the stress almost drove him mad, and he ended a victim of his own meat grinder. A degenerate monster, a slavish bureaucrat, a slick administrator, a sadistic torturer yet also a broken reed, Yezhov pioneered a new sort of mass-production totalitarian slaughter for the mid-20th century. “Tell Stalin,” he announced at his trial, “I shall die with his name on my lips.”

ZHUKOV

1896–1974

If we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks exactly as if it was not there.

Georgi Zhukov to Dwight Eisenhower

The Soviet general Georgi Zhukov is much less famous in the West than generals such as Eisenhower and Montgomery, but he was undoubtedly the greatest commander of the Second World War, turning the tide against the Nazi invaders at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and then leading the Red Army in its bloody counteroffensive all the way to Berlin. Without the heroic Soviet effort, with its sacrifice of 26 million lives, the war might have ended very differently. Zhukov was a communist and a ruthless Stalinist general, who placed results far above his concern for individuals and casualties and used summary executions at the front to enforce discipline. Yet he was also a gifted leader, who represents not the cruelty of his master, Soviet dictator Stalin, but the heroism of the Russian people.

Military service dominated Zhukov’s life. Conscripted as a private in the First World War, this son of peasants was decorated and promoted. He then fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War of 1918–21. Further promotions followed in the 1920s, and Zhukov became known both as a strict disciplinarian and as a diligent planner. When Stalin slaughtered the officers of the Red Army in the 1937 Terror, Zhukov survived and was promoted.

In 1939 Zhukov commanded the Soviet army against the Japanese on the Khalkin-Gol River. His daring use of tanks led to the defeat of the Japanese within three days. The invaders lost as many as 61,000 of their 80,000 men, and the shock put them off attacking Russia ever again. Zhukov earned the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and in 1940 was appointed chief of staff, but staff work did not suit him: he was a fighting general. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Zhukov formed a tempestuous, but ultimately successful, partnership with Stalin. The Soviet dictator recognized Zhukov’s brilliance and professionalism, accepting him as his military mentor and making him deputy supreme commander-in-chief.