Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov

Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov (1895-1940), chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD (Russian acronym for People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) from 1936 to 1938, and organizer of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s violent purges of the Communist Party. Born in Saint Petersburg, Yezhov went to work in a factory at the age of 14. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. After serving as a commissar in the Red Army until 1922, he worked in the Communist Party apparatus as an obkom (district committee) secretary in the Kirgiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (renamed the Kazakh ASSR in 1925; now Kazakhstan). In 1927 Yezhov was transferred to Moscow to work as a functionary for the Central Committee, one of the party’s highest administrative bodies. From 1929 to 1930 he served as deputy people’s commissar for agriculture, implementing Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization in which privately owned lands were confiscated by the government and consolidated into large state farms. In 1930 Yezhov moved back to the Central Committee, where he headed the departments for personnel, assignments, and industry until 1934. In that year he was elected a member of the Central Committee and the Orgburo (Organizational Bureau), an administrative subcommittee of the Central Committee; he also was appointed deputy chairman of the Central Control Commission. By 1935 Yezhov became chairman of that commission and secretary of the Central Committee with oversight for the NKVD, a predecessor agency of the KGB.

Stalin made Yezhov chief of the NKVD in September 1936, replacing Genrikh Yagoda. Stalin’s purges of his political opponents at this time gained momentum and were extended to all of Soviet society, giving rise to the term “Yezhovshchina” to describe the 1936-1938 period in which the NKVD arrested and executed millions of innocent victims. In 1937 Yezhov became a member of the Politburo, the USSR’s highest decision-making body, but after appointing Yezhov people’s commissar of water transport in April 1938, Stalin dismissed him as NKVD chief toward the end of the year, replacing him with Lavrenty Beria. Yezhov was arrested in 1939 and executed the next year.