As is known from history, most of those who sent nobles and members of the royal family to France to the guillotine during the Great Terror in the 18th century were subsequently executed themselves. Even a catch phrase appeared, voiced by Justice Minister Danton, which he said before he was beheaded: "The revolution devours its children."
The story repeated itself during the years of Stalinist terror, when one stroke of the pen yesterday, the executioner could end up on the same prison bunkers or be shot without trial, like those whom he himself sent to death.
A striking example of what has been said is Nikolay Yezhov, the Commissar of the Interior of the USSR. The reliability of many pages of his biography is questioned by historians, because there are many dark spots in it.
Parents
According to the official version, Nikolay Yezhov was born in 1895 in St. Petersburg in a working class family.
At the same time, there is an opinion that the father of the People's Commissar was Ivan Yezhov, who was a native of s. Volkhonshchino (Tula province) and served military service in Lithuania. There he met a local girl, whom he soon married, deciding not to return to his homeland. After demobilization, the Yezhov family moved to Suvalka province, and Ivan got a job in the police.
Childhood
At the time of Kolya’s birth, his parents most likely lived in one of the villages of Mariampol County (now the territory of Lithuania). After 3 years, the boy’s father was appointed zemstvo guard of the district city plot. This circumstance was the reason that the family moved to Mariampol, where Kolya studied for 3 years in primary school.
Having considered his son sufficiently educated, in 1906 his parents sent him to a relative in St. Petersburg, where he was supposed to master tailoring.
Youth
Although the biography of Nikolai Yezhov indicates that until 1911 he worked at the Putilov plant as a student of a locksmith. However, archival documents do not confirm this. All that is known is that in 1913 the young man returned to his parents in Suvalka province, and then wandered in search of work. Moreover, for some time he even lived in Tilsit (Germany).
In the summer of 1915, Yezhov Nikolai volunteered for the army. After training in the 76th Infantry Battalion, he was sent to the Northwest Front.
Two months later, after suffering a serious illness and a slight wound, he was sent to the rear, and in the early summer of 1916, Nikolai Yezhov, whose height was only 1 m 51 cm, was found unfit for military service. For this reason, he was sent to the rear workshop in Vitebsk, where he went on guard and outfits, and soon, as the most competent of the soldiers, he was appointed clerk.
In the fall of 1917, Nikolay Yezhov was hospitalized, and having returned to his unit only at the beginning of 1918, he was dismissed for 6 months due to illness. He again went to his parents, who at that time lived in the Tver province. Since August of that year, Yezhov began working at the glass factory, which was located in Vyshny Volochyok.
Beginning of a party career
In a questionnaire filled out by Yezhov himself in the early 1920s, he indicated that he joined the RSDLP in May 1917. However, after some time, he began to claim that he had done this in March 1917. At the same time, according to the testimony of some members of the Vitebsk city organization of the RSDLP, Yezhov joined its ranks only on August 3.
In April 1919, he was drafted into the Red Army and sent to the radio base in Saratov. There, he first served as an ordinary, and then as a scribe at command. In October of that year, Nikolay Yezhov took up the post of commissar of the base where radio specialists were trained, and in the spring of 1921 he was appointed commissar of the base and was elected deputy head of the propaganda department of the Tatar Regional Committee of the RCP.
At party work in the capital
In July 1921, Nikolay Yezhov registered a marriage with A. Titova. Shortly after the wedding, the bride went to Moscow and got her husband transferred there.
In the capital, Yezhov began to quickly advance in service. In particular, a few months later he was sent to the Mari Regional Party Committee as executive secretary.
He then held the following party positions:
- Executive Secretary of the Semipalatinsk Provincial Committee;
- Head of the organizational department of the Kyrgyz regional committee;
- Deputy Executive Secretary of the Kazak Regional Committee;
- instructor of the organizational department of the Central Committee.
According to the leadership, Nikolay Ivanovich Ezhov was an ideal performer, but had a significant drawback - he could not stop, even in situations where nothing could be done.
After working in the Central Committee until 1929, he held the post of deputy commissar of agriculture of the USSR for 12 months, and then returned to the organizational department as head.
"Cleansing"
The distribution department was headed by Nikolai Yezhov until 1934. Then he was included in the Central Commission of the CPSU, which was supposed to carry out the "purge" of the party, and from February 1935 he was elected chairman of the CPC and secretary of the Central Committee.
From 1934 to 1935, on behalf of Stalin, Yezhov headed the commission on the Kremlin case and the investigation of the Kirov assassination. It was he who linked them with the activities of Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev, in fact, having entered into a conspiracy with Agranov against the chief of the last People's Commissar of the NKVD Yagoda.
New appointment
In September 1936, I. Stalin and A. Zhdanov, who were on vacation at that time, sent a cipher telegram to the capital, addressed to Molotov, Kaganovich and the rest of the Politburo members of the Central Committee. In it, they demanded that Yezhov be appointed to the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, leaving Agranov as his deputy.
Of course, the order was executed immediately, and already in early October 1936, Nikolai Yezhov signed the first order in his department to take office.
Yezhov Nikolay - People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
Like G. Yagoda, he was subordinated to the state security organs and the police, as well as auxiliary services, for example, the fire department and highway.
At his new post, Nikolai Yezhov organized repressions against people who were suspected of espionage or anti-Soviet activities, “purges” in the party, mass arrests, and expulsions on social, national, and organizational grounds.
In particular, after the Central Committee plenum instructed him in March 1937 to clean up the bodies of the NKVD, 2,273 officers of this department were arrested. In addition, it was under Yezhov that orders began to descend on the local NKVD bodies indicating the number of unreliable citizens subject to arrest, execution, deportation or imprisonment in prisons and camps.
For these "exploits" Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin. Also among his merits can be attributed to the destruction of the old guard of revolutionaries, who knew the unsightly details of biographies of many of the first persons of the state.
On April 8, 1938, Yezhov was appointed concurrently the People's Commissar of Water Transport, and a few months later Lavrenty Beria took over the posts of the First Deputy NKVD and the Head of the Main Department of State Security.
Opal
In November 1938, a denunciation of Nikolai Yezhov, which was signed by the head of the Ivanovo Directorate of the NKVD, was discussed at the KP Politburo. A few days later, the People's Commissar filed a resignation letter, in which he admitted his responsibility for the wrecking activities of the "enemies" who, due to his negligence, entered the prosecutor's office and the NKVD.
Anticipating his imminent arrest, in a letter to the leader of the peoples, he asked not to touch his “seventy-year-old old mother,” and concluded his message with the words that he “smashed the enemies great.”
In December 1938, Izvestia and Pravda published a report stating that Yezhov, according to his request, had been relieved of his duties as head of the NKVD, but retained the post of People’s Commissar for Water Transport. His successor was Lavrenty Beria, who began his new job with the arrests of people close to Yezhov in the NKVD, the courts and the prosecutor's office.
On the day of the 15th anniversary of the death of V.I. Lenin, N. Yezhov was present for the last time at an important event of state significance - a ceremonial meeting dedicated to this sad anniversary. However, an event followed that directly indicated that clouds of anger of the leader of the peoples were gathering over him even more than before - he was not elected a delegate to the XVIII Congress of the CPSU.
Arrest
In April 1939, Yezhov Nikolai Ivanovich, whose biography until that moment was the story of an incredible career take-off of a person who had barely graduated from primary school, was taken into custody. The arrest occurred in the office of Malenkov, with the participation of Beria, who was appointed to investigate his case. From there he was sent to the Sukhanovskaya special prison of the NKVD of the USSR.
After 2 weeks, Yezhov wrote a note in which he admitted that he was homosexual. Subsequently, it was used as evidence that he committed unnatural acts of a sexual nature for selfish and anti-Soviet purposes.
However, the main thing that was blamed on him was the preparation of a coup d'etat and terrorist personnel, who were supposed to be used to commit attempts on members of the party and government on November 7 on Red Square during a workers ’demonstration.
Sentence and Execution
Nikolai Yezhov, whose photo is presented in the article, rejected all the charges and called his lack of diligence in the matter of “cleaning” the state security organs.
In his last word at the trial, Yezhov said that he was beaten during the investigation, although he had been honestly fighting and destroying the enemies of the people for 25 years. In addition, he said that if he wanted to carry out a terrorist attack against one of the members of the government, then he did not need to recruit anyone, he could simply use the appropriate equipment.
On February 3, 1940, the former People's Commissar was sentenced to death. The execution took place the next day. According to the testimonies of those who accompanied him in the last minutes of his life, before the execution he sang “Internationale”. The death of Nikolai Yezhov came instantly. To destroy even the memory of the former ally, the party elite decided to cremate his corpse.
After death
Nothing was said about the trial of Yezhov and his execution. The only thing that an ordinary citizen of the Country of Soviets noted was the return of the former name to the city of Cherkessk, as well as the disappearance of images of the former People’s Commissar from group photographs.
In 1998, Nikolai Yezhov was declared not subject to rehabilitation by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The following facts were cited as arguments:
- Yezhov organized a series of killings of individuals who were personally objectionable to him;
- he took the life of his wife, as she could expose his illegal activities, and did everything to pass off this crime as an act of suicide;
- as a result of operations carried out in accordance with the orders of Nikolai Yezhov, over one and a half million citizens were repressed.
Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich: personal life
As already mentioned, the first wife of the executed people's commissar was Antonina Titova (1897-1988). The couple divorced in 1930 and had no children.
With his second wife - Eugenia (Sulamifyu) Solomonovna - Yezhov met when she was still married to a diplomat and journalist Alexei Gladun. The young woman soon divorced and became the wife of a promising party functionary.
The couple failed to give birth to their own child, but they adopted an orphan. The girl’s name was Natalya, and after the suicide of her adoptive mother, which happened shortly before Yezhov’s arrest and execution, she ended up in an orphanage.
Now you know who Nikolai Yezhov was, whose biography was quite typical for many employees of the state apparatus of those years, seizing power in the first years of the formation of the USSR and ending their lives in the same way as their victims.