"Dragonfly" of the Central Committee of the CPSU

While he was torturing the innocent in the dungeons of Lubyanka, rotting them in the camps and signing execution lists, she fluttered through theater premieres and Kremlin banquets, surrounded by numerous lovers. But he forgave, and they were together. And they died almost together: she– from the saving poison sent by him, he - from the bullet of his party comrades. The story of the love and death of the Stalinist executioner Nikolai Yezhov and the Bolshevik socialite Zhenya Feigenberg.

Mid-August 1938, the dacha of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov in Dugino, late evening. They have dinner in the house, three people are at the table - Yezhov himself, his wife Evgenia Solomonovna Khayutina and her friend Zinaida Glikina. The "Iron People's Commissar" is short, puny, narrow-chested and looks like a troll from a German horror story. The similarity is exacerbated by the fact that Yezhov is constantly twisting his lips - today he is not in the mood. Evgenia Khayutina is nine years younger than her husband. The Commissar's wife is a prominent woman, she is beautiful with some kind of southern, sultry beauty. Yes, and Khayutina, she was only by her first husband, and as a girl, she bore the surname Feigenberg. After dinner, a huge scandal awaits the couple, which a few months later Zinaida Glikina will describe during interrogation at the NKVD:
- Did you live with Sholokhov? Yezhov asked his wife, took out a sheaf of papers and forced her to read, and not to himself, but aloud.
Zhenya Khayutina began to read, but immediately stumbled - it was a transcript of the wiretapping of her yesterday's meeting with Mikhail Sholokhov at the National Hotel. The stenographer reacted creatively to her work, even provided the transcript with explanatory comments: “go to the bathroom” or “go to bed.” The people's commissar snatched the papers from his wife, threw them on the floor and began to beat his wife. He beat her seriously: both in the face and in the chest. Zinaida Glikina ran out of the room in horror: she thought that the Yezhovs had an open marriage and they did not hide betrayal from each other, so the family scene she saw struck her doubly.

Nikolai Yezhov was then the head of the organizational department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. The chief Bolshevik personnel officer and the former typist of the Soviet trade mission in Berlin, Zhenya Khayutina, met in 1929 in a Sochi sanatorium. He was unprepossessing, but courteous and sweet. And it is very touching, which had a good effect on women: by the way, the wife of the former chief Yezhov, Ivan Moskvin, who was later repressed along with her husband, felt sorry for him and tried to feed him in every possible way:
- Eat, sparrow! ..

Sparrow was indeed in poor health: tuberculosis, anemia and a whole bunch of other diseases, including long-standing, but healed syphilis. Yezhov worked, nevertheless, not sparing himself, and just as earnestly persecuted women. Later, during interrogation at the NKVD, Zinaida Glikina will tell that Yezhov did not even allow domestic servants to pass.

He began courting Zhenya immediately in Sochi, then the romance continued in Moscow. Yezhov had divorced by this time, her current marriage with Gladun had completely decayed, and in 1931 they got married. Both - each in his own way - were children of the new time, and in this respect they were a harmonious couple. Yezhov, a boy from a poor working-class family who joined the party, was given everything by the revolution. He faithfully served her and quickly rose to the very top: the path from a clerk under a petty Saratov commissar to the head of a key department of the Central Committee was completed in just eight years. And Zhenya Feigenberg, a girl from a Jewish merchant family, received freedom and took full advantage of it. Intelligent boys and girls remembered the old world very well: in it a rigidly regulated life was waiting for them, painted from “a” to “z” ...

And suddenly all this collapsed, in the 1920s everything became possible, only the Soviet power was untouchable. Evgenia Feigenberg-Khayutina with her two nomenklatura marriages - the first husband was the head of a department in the People's Commissariat, the second worked as the secretary of the Soviet trade mission in London - the experience of living abroad, her easy disposition, innate courage and organizational gift became the ideal person of the new time.

Behind the back of the working boy Yezhov was a poor youth full of humiliation. It is known that he was repeatedly beaten in the street as a child, and among the hooligans was even his own brother Ivan, who once broke a mandolin about him. In the tsarist army, Yezhov became more and more ill; He joined the party not too early and not too late, in August 1917 - and he was not considered an "old Bolshevik", but he did not get into the "adhering" either. His party career immediately set off: his same former boss, Moskvin, said that "as a worker, Yezhov has no shortcomings - except for excessive, out of the ordinary diligence."

And everywhere Yezhov went, they appreciate him, and love him, and try to keep him. The Central Committee almost by force scratches him out of the Kazakh regional committee, although the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Kazakh Communist Party Goloshchekin wants to make Yezhov his successor. He has to be sent on vacation and a sanatorium almost by force - otherwise, doctors from departmental clinics cannot vouch for anything: “Comrade Yezhov’s body is weak, exhausted by overwork". But even from a vacation or a sanatorium, he again rushes to Moscow. Go find such an employee, when party comrades, proven over the years, are idle and drink themselves to death right in front of your eyes.

Another conversation, what kind of person he was. Although for the time being there is a feeling that it seems to be quite good. And none of those who knew him before working in the NKVD remembered Yezhov's sadism. However, Yezhov, of course, was not burdened with education, reflections and spiritual baggage. It seems that he also did not have an inner core: in front of the leader and the party, he is a blank slate on which you can paint anything.

Ezhov may have been weak in body, but strong in character. Apparently, therefore, Stalin entrusted the nominee to shake up the whole country, and before that - to clean up a close-knit, dangerous, tough and disillusioned KGB corporation. He cleaned it up: he destroyed almost the entire top of the NKVD - he imprisoned and shot more than 14 thousand ordinary Chekists. And by the time of the family scandal in Dugino, Yezhov had already repressed hundreds of thousands of people, and he personally tortured many people, knocking confessions out of them. And, of course, together with the rest of the Stalinist elite, he signed mass death sentences. From such a life, Yezhov, of course, developed a strong neurosis - he jammed it with cognac and vodka. Apparently, at some point, the "iron commissar" broke loose and remembered Sholokhov's wife. They reconciled, however, quickly: Nikolai Ivanovich loved his Zhenya very much.

Later, her lovers will be listed, many names will come up during interrogations at the NKVD. They will name both the writer Isaac Babel and the Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt. When Babel is arrested, he will explain his interest in the Yezhov family by the fact that he wanted to see the chief Chekist closely, to feel, to understand. The NKVD in those years really had a special, terrible and attractive halo, as sometimes happens with outright evil, and many wonderful people were drawn to the Chekists - from Yesenin to Mayakovsky. But the Commissar's wife, it seems, did not feel all this: she lived outside the world that her husband did. She turned her new home into a literary salon. Yes, and her work was interesting: formally, she was listed as the deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine "USSR at a Construction Site", in fact, she led it. For the time being, Yezhov did not bother her with jealousy, she had many admirers, she had a wonderful social life - premieres, receptions, Kremlin banquets. "Dragonfly" - that's what the ladies from the highest party light called her.

The story with Sholokhov, most likely, infuriated Yezhov because the NKVD was then developing a writer who had not yet become an icon of Soviet literature, and even preparing his arrest. But Sholokhov played ahead of the curve: he wrote a letter about the excesses of the NKVD "on the ground" and managed to pass it on to Stalin's secretary Poskrebyshev. To do this, he had to, hiding from the Chekists, go to Moscow on a freight train. The continuation of this story is known only from the words of Sholokhov himself: allegedly, an emergency meeting was held at Stalin, to which Sholokhov was taken very drunk, and that Stalin was harsh with Yezhov, and as a result, Sholokhov was not touched, and then Poskrebyshev himself made him drunk.

The “Great Terror” could not continue indefinitely: the slightest hint not only of the opposition, but of any free-thinking was already exterminated, the country was brought into a state of uncomplaining humility, which was enough for many decades to come. And the ritual execution of the one who embodied all this cleansing became inevitable. The fall was inevitable. He was preceded by demonstrative manifestations of "the highest displeasure": Yezhov was appointed a new first deputy - the former first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPB of Georgia, Lavrenty Beria, who was supposed to look after his boss. And Yezhov himself was unexpectedly appointed People's Commissar of Water Transport, but with the preservation of the post of head of the NKVD, however, only for now - this was how the apparatus castling was being prepared: Yezhov's predecessor, Yagoda, was transferred to the postal people's commissariat before his arrest. It all happened in August 1938, on the same days as the family quarrel at the dacha in Dugino.

During the interrogation, Zinaida Glikina will recall the rumors that were then circulating in Moscow that, they say, Stalin personally dealt with the case of the adultery of the Commissar's wife. The capital's "word of mouth" was almost not mistaken: Stalin ordered Yezhov to get a divorce. But it was, of course, not in Sholokhov: "the leader of all peoples" remembered the "Trotskyist connections of the Commissar's wife." The accusation of Trotskyism was fictitious and completely untenable, but at the same time deadly. Yezhov told his wife about everything, they did not want to get a divorce. Stalin again ordered him to divorce. Yezhov again talked to his wife, but the result was the same - he loved his Zhenya too much.

Evgenia Khayutina went crazy with horror and wrote to Stalin - he did not answer. Yezhov sent his wife to rest in the Crimea, and from there she sent him desperate letters: “Kolyushenka, in Moscow I was in such a crazy state that I could not even talk to you. I beg you very much, and not only I ask, but I insist to check my whole life. If I'm still alive, it's only because I don't want to cause you trouble." But nothing depended on him anymore: the NKVD took Beria into his hands, if Yezhov came to the People's Commissariat for Water Transport, it was only to drink in his office. Naturally, things in the people's commissariat now entrusted to Yezhov began to fall apart, and his deputy wrote a memorandum against him, and, of course, she was given a move.

Soon Zinaida Glikina was arrested, and Yevgenia Khayutina began to have a severe nervous breakdown. She was hospitalized in the Vorovsky sanatorium - its building still stands in the park of the Moscow cinema "Warsaw". They talk about the future in different ways: someone believes that she got the luminal herself, others think that the poison was sent to her by her husband, and a trinket was attached to it - a conventional sign that meant that it was time for her to leave. She was pursued from all sides and seemed to be squeezed out of life. Khayutina was poisoned on November 19, 1938, but it was not possible to save her. The wife of the then people's commissar of water transport was buried with honor. At the same time, Yezhov himself was not at the funeral, he said to his family: “Zhenya did well that she was poisoned, otherwise it would have been worse for her.”

A few months later, on April 10, 1939, Beria arrested Yezhov right in Malenkov's office. Yezhov was tortured and, among other things, it turned out that, drinking with one of his old friends, he scolded Beria and the Soviet government with might and main. By the way, Stalin will demand to find Yezhov's drinking companion, which once again emphasizes how much the "leader of all peoples" was immersed in the details of this case and led it. Investigators also learned about Yezhov's bisexuality, which in itself was considered a crime under Soviet law. But the main accusations, of course, concerned treason: Yezhov was found guilty of preparing a coup d'état and murdering the leaders of the Soviet state. Yezhov categorically denied all accusations and called his only mistake the fact that "he did not clean enough organs from enemies of the people." The military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced Yezhov to death, on February 4, 1940, the sentence was carried out.

And Zhenechka, who lived her short life with such pleasure and so easily, slipped away from the investigation, torture and execution. The Soviet government crushed the generation of her peers, who treated the new life as a fun carnival and adventure. The child was knocked out of the poetess Bergholz during interrogation, the director Sats, also the wife of the people's commissar, was sitting, like Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Molotov, like hundreds of thousands of others who lay down in the ground ahead of time, having drunk the cup of suffering in full.

In 1998, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation already refused the posthumous rehabilitation of Yezhov as the organizer of mass repressions and murders.

Alexey Filippov

On February 4, 1940, Nikolai Yezhov was shot. The "Iron People's Commissar", who was also called the "bloody dwarf", he became the ideal executor of Stalin's will, but he himself was "played out" in a cruel political game ...

Another Shoemaker's Apprentice

Kolya Yezhov's childhood was not easy. He was born into a poor peasant family, received practically no education, only graduated from elementary school in Mariampol. At the age of 11, he went to work and learn a craft in St. Petersburg. Lived with relatives.
According to the official biography, Kolya worked at several factories, according to the unofficial biography, he was a student of a shoemaker and a tailor. Ezhov's craft was not easy. Even too much. At the age of 15, when he was still an apprentice shoemaker, he became addicted to sodomy. He indulged in this business until his death, but did not disdain female attention.

Did not excel at the fronts

Nikolai Yezhov went to the front as a volunteer in 1915. He really wanted fame and really wanted to follow orders, but Yezhov turned out to be a bad soldier. He was wounded and sent to the rear. Then he was completely recognized as unfit for military service due to his small stature. As the most literate of the soldiers, he was appointed clerk.

In the Red Army, Yezhov also did not acquire feats of arms. Sickly and nervous, he was sent from the ranks to be a copyist for the base's command commissioner. An unsuccessful military career, however, would later play into Yezhov's hands and become one of the reasons for Stalin's disposition towards him.

Napoleon complex

Stalin was not tall (1.73) and tried to form his inner circle from people no higher than himself. Yezhov in this respect was just a godsend for Stalin. His height - 1.51 cm showed the greatness of the leader very favorably. Short stature has long been Yezhov's curse. He was not taken seriously, driven out of the army, half the world looked down on him. This developed an obvious "Napoleon complex" in Yezhov.

He was not educated, but intuition, reaching the level of animal instinct, helped him to serve the one who should. He was the perfect performer. Like a dog that chooses only one owner, he chose Joseph Stalin as his owner. Only he selflessly served him and almost literally "dragged the bones to the owner."
The displacement of the “Napoleon complex” was also expressed in the fact that Nikolai Yezhov especially liked to interrogate tall people, he was especially cruel to them.

Nicholas - keen eye

Yezhov was a "disposable" people's commissar. Stalin used him for the "great terror" with the skill of a grandmaster. He needed a man who did not distinguish himself on the fronts, who did not have deep ties with the government elite, a man who was able to curry favor for everything for the sake of desire, who was able not to ask, but to blindly fulfill.


At the parade in May 1937, Yezhov stood on the podium of the Mausoleum, surrounded by those against whom he had already opened volumes of criminal cases. On the grave with the body of Lenin, he stood with those whom he continued to call "comrades" and knew that the "comrades" were actually dead. He smiled cheerfully and waved to the working Soviet people with his small but tenacious hand.
In 1934, Yezhov and Yagoda were responsible for controlling the mood of the delegates at the 17th Congress. During the secret ballot, they were vigilant about who the delegates were voting for. Yezhov compiled his lists of "unreliable" and "enemies of the people" with cannibalistic fanaticism.

"Yezhovshchina" and "Yagodinsky set"

Stalin entrusted Yezhov with the investigation into the murder of Kirov. Yezhov did his best. The Kirov Stream, at the base of which stood Zinoviev and Kamenev accused of conspiracy, dragged thousands of people behind it. In total, 39,660 people were evicted from Leningrad and the Leningrad Region in 1935, and 24,374 people were sentenced to various punishments.


But that was only the beginning. Ahead was the “great terror”, during which, as historians like to say, “the army was bled dry”, and often innocent people went to the camps in stages without any possibility of returning. By the way, Stalin's attack on the military was accompanied by a number of "distracting maneuvers."
On November 21, 1935, for the first time in the USSR, the title "Marshal of the Soviet Union" was introduced, awarded to five top military leaders. During the purge, two of these five people were shot, and one died from torture during interrogations.

With ordinary people, Stalin and Yezhov did not use "feints". Yezhov personally sent orders to the regions, in which he called for an increase in the limit for the “first”, firing category. Yezhov not only signed orders, but also liked to be personally present during the execution.
In March 1938, the sentence in the case of Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and others was carried out. Yagoda was the last to be shot, and before that he and Bukharin were put on chairs and forced to watch the execution of the sentence. It is significant that Yezhov kept Yagoda's things until the end of his days. The "Yagoda set" included a collection of pornographic photographs and films, bullets that killed Zinoviev and Kamenev, and a rubber dildo...

Cuckold

Nikolai Yezhov was extremely cruel, but extremely cowardly. He sent thousands of people to the camps and put them against the wall, but he could not oppose anything to those to whom his "master" was not indifferent. So, in 1938, Mikhail Sholokhov cohabited with Yezhov's legal wife, Sulamifya Solomonovna Khayutina (Faigenberg), with complete impunity.


Yezhov's wife with daughter Natalya
Love meetings took place in the rooms of Moscow hotels and were tapped with special equipment. Printouts of records of intimate details regularly lay down on the People's Commissar's desk. Yezhov could not stand it and ordered his wife to be poisoned. With Sholokhov, he preferred not to get involved.

The last word

On April 10, 1939, Yezhov was arrested with the participation of Beria and Malenkov in the latter's office. The case of Yezhov, according to Sudoplatov, was conducted personally by Beria and his closest associate Bogdan Kobulov. Yezhov was accused of preparing a coup d'état.

Yezhov knew perfectly well how these things were done, therefore he did not justify himself at the trial, but only regretted that he “didn’t finish it:
“I cleared 14,000 Chekists. But my fault lies in the fact that I did not clean them enough. I had such a position. I gave the task to this or that head of the department to interrogate the arrested person and at the same time I myself thought: today you are interrogating him, and tomorrow I will arrest you. All around me were the enemies of the people, my enemies. Everywhere I cleaned security officers. I did not clean only them in Moscow, Leningrad and the North Caucasus. I considered them honest, but in fact it turned out that under my wing I hid saboteurs, pests, spies and other kinds of enemies of the people.


Widely known pre-war photographs: People's Commissar Yezhov was shot and immediately thrown out of the photo. Joseph Stalin must be clean in everything!


After the death of Yezhov, they began to remove him from photographs with Stalin. So the death of a little villain helped the development of the art of retouching. History retouching.

Image copyright unknown

75 years ago, on April 10, 1939, the former People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Nikolai Yezhov was arrested, whom the poet Dzhambul called "Stalin's batyr", and his victims - "a bloody dwarf".

Few political figures, especially those who did not head the state, gave their name to the era. Nikolai Yezhov is one of them.

According to Alexander Tvardovsky, Stalin "knew how to transfer a heap of his mistakes to someone else's account." The mass repressions of 1937-1938 remained in history as Yezhovism, although it would be more fair to speak of Stalinism.

"Fiend of nomenclature"

Unlike the professional Chekists Menzhinsky, Yagoda and Beria, Yezhov was a party worker.

After graduating from three grades of elementary school, he turned out to be the most poorly educated head of the Soviet / Russian special services in history.

He was called a dwarf because of his height - only 154 centimeters.

Nikolai Yezhov was born on April 22 (May 1), 1895 in the village of Veivery, Mariampolsky district, Suvalki province (now Lithuania).

According to his biographer Alexei Pavlyukov, the father of the future Commissar Ivan Yezhov served in the police. Subsequently, Yezhov claimed that he was a hereditary proletarian, the son of a worker at the Putilov factory, and he himself managed to work there as a locksmith, although in reality he studied privately in tailoring.

He also, to put it mildly, reported incorrect information about the time of his joining the Bolsheviks: he indicated March 1917 in his autobiographies, while, according to the documents of the Vitebsk city organization of the RSDLP, this happened on August 3.

In June 1915, Yezhov volunteered for the army, and after being slightly wounded, he was transferred to the post of clerk. He was drafted into the Red Army in April 1919, and again served as a clerk at the school of military radio operators in Saratov. Six months later, he became the commissioner of the school.

Yezhov's career took off after being transferred to Moscow in September 1921. Five months later, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee sent him as secretary of the provincial committee to the Mari Autonomous Region.

At that time, narrow-minded wits called Stalin "comrade Kartotekov." While the rest of the "leaders", reveling in themselves, talked about the world revolution, Stalin and his collaborators fiddled all day with the cards that they brought to thousands of "promising party members."

Yezhov was distinguished by his natural intelligence and worker-peasant practical mind, flair, and ability to navigate. And endless devotion to Stalin. Not showy. Sincere! Vladimir Nekrasov, historian

In 1922 alone, the secretariat of the Central Committee and the Accounting and Distribution Department created by Stalin made more than 10,000 appointments in the party and state apparatus, and replaced 42 secretaries of provincial committees.

At that time, the nomenklatura did not linger for a long time in one place. Yezhov worked in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in December 1925, at the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b), he met Ivan Moskvin, who two months later headed the Organizing Department of the Central Committee and took Yezhov to his instructor.

In November 1930 Yezhov took the place of Moskvin. According to available data, his personal acquaintance with Stalin belongs to the same time.

“I don’t know a more ideal worker than Yezhov. Or rather, not a worker, but a performer. Having entrusted him with something, you can not check and be sure that he will do everything. Yezhov has only one drawback: he does not know how to stop. follow him in order to stop him in time,” Moskvin told his son-in-law Lev Razgon, who survived the Gulag and became a famous writer.

Moskvin came home every day for dinner and often brought Yezhov with him. The patron's wife called him "sparrow" and tried to feed him better.

In 1937, Moskvin received "10 years without the right to correspond." After imposing on the report the standard resolution: "Arrest", Yezhov added: "And his wife too."

Sofya Moskvina was accused of trying to poison Yezhov on the instructions of British intelligence, and was shot. If it were not for the intervention of a former friend at home, I would have got off with sending to the camp.

Yezhov became involved in Chekist affairs after the assassination of Kirov.

"Yezhov summoned me to his dacha. The meeting was of a conspiratorial nature. Yezhov conveyed Stalin's instructions on the mistakes made by the investigation into the case of the Trotskyist center, and instructed me to take measures to open the Trotskyist center, to reveal a clearly undiscovered terrorist gang and Trotsky's personal role in this matter ", one of his deputies Yakov Agranov reported to Yagoda.

The dream of a world revolution left with Trotsky, and even the Boss himself could not afford to offer the village lumpen who had risen from rags to riches the idea of ​​universal equality and fraternity. All he had to do was to shoot some "red boyars" to intimidate others Mark Solonin, historian

Until 1937, Yezhov did not give the impression of a demonic personality. He was sociable, gallant with ladies, loved Yesenin's poems, willingly participated in feasts and danced "Russian".

The writer Yuri Dombrovsky, whose acquaintances knew Yezhov personally, claimed that among them "there was not a single one who would say bad things about Yezhov, he was a sympathetic, humane, gentle, tactful person."

Nadezhda Mandelstam, who met Yezhov in Sukhumi in the summer of 1930, recalled him as a "modest and rather pleasant person" who gave her roses and often drove them with her husband in her car.

All the more surprising is the metamorphosis that happened to him.

“Yezhov is deservedly considered the bloodiest executioner in the history of Russia. But any Stalinist appointee would do the same in his place. Yezhov was not a fiend of hell, he was a fiend of the nomenklatura,” wrote historian Mikhail Voslensky.

Great terror

In the Soviet era, the opinion was cultivated that the crimes of the regime were entirely reduced to the notorious 1937, and everything was fine before and after. Under Khrushchev, it was unofficially suggested that the leader simply had a temporary clouding of his mind.

The idea was persistently imposed that Stalin's only fault was the repressions against the nomenklatura.

Stalin hit his own, the veterans of the party and the revolution! For this we condemn him! From the report of Nikita Khrushchev at the XX Congress of the CPSU

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the first to say that the terror from 1918 to 1953 did not stop for a day. In his opinion, the only difference was that in the 37th it was the turn of high-ranking communists, it was their descendants who made the hype around the "damned nine hundred". At the same time, historical justice was done to the "Leninist Guard", although they were executed not by those who had the moral right to do so, and not for what they should have done.

Now we can say that he was right in part. The events, at the suggestion of the British historian Robert Conquest, known as the "Great Terror" were nevertheless exceptional.

Of the 799,455 people executed from 1921 to 1953 for political reasons, 681,692 people were executed in 1937-1938, with about a hundred ordinary people per "faithful Leninist". If in other periods about every twentieth of those arrested were sentenced to death, and the rest were sent to the Gulag, then during the Great Terror - almost every second.

In autocratic Russia, from 1825 to 1905, 625 death sentences were passed, of which 191 were carried out. During the suppression of the revolution of 1905-1907, about 2,200 people were hanged and shot.

It was in 1937 that the most severe torture and beatings of those under investigation took on a mass character.

Probably, even representatives of the nomenklatura had questions about this, since Stalin considered it necessary on January 10, 1939 to send an encrypted telegram to the heads of regional party organizations and departments of the NKVD, which said: "The use of physical force in the practice of the NKVD was allowed from 1937. permission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks considers that the method of physical influence must necessarily be applied in the future."

For obvious reasons, the descendants of a thousand repressed peasants will never draw such attention to the tragedy of their families as the descendants of one repressed Politburo member Mark Solonin, historian

In addition to the 680,000 who were shot, about 115,000 people "died while under investigation," in other words, under torture. Among them was, for example, Marshal Vasily Blucher, who did not wait for his bullet.

“We noticed gray-brown spots on several pages of the protocol. We ordered a forensic chemical examination. It turned out to be blood,” recalled Boris Viktorov, deputy chief military prosecutor, who was reviewing the “Tukhachevsky case” in the 1950s.

One of the investigators in 1937 proudly told his colleagues how Yezhov came into his office and asked if the arrested person would confess. "When I said no, Nikolai Ivanovich would turn around and bang him in the face!"

Threefold Purpose

First, the blow was dealt to the "Leninist guard", in whose eyes Stalin, despite all the praises, remained not a god-like leader, but the first among equals.

Having committed horrific atrocities against the people, these people have become accustomed to relative freedom, inviolability and the right to their own opinion in relation to themselves.

Prince Vladimir Andrey Bogolyubsky, who is considered the first "autocrat" in Russia, was condemned (and subsequently killed) by the boyars because he wanted to make them "helpers". Stalin set himself the same task, so that, according to the well-known expression of Ivan the Terrible, everyone was like grass, and he alone was like a mighty oak.

After the war, the Communist Party of France was called the "Party of the Executed". But this name is especially suitable for Lenin's Bolshevik Party Mikhail Voslensky, historian

If in 1930 among the secretaries of the regional committees and the republican Central Committee 69% were with pre-revolutionary party experience, then in 1939 80.5% of them joined the party after the death of Lenin.

The 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, held in 1934 and officially called the "Congress of the Victors", turned out to be the "Congress of the Doomed": 1108 out of 1956 delegates and 97 out of 139 elected members of the Central Committee were executed, five more committed suicide.

Secondly, according to historians, Stalin decided to "cleanse the country" before the big war: after the establishment of an illegitimate dictatorship, the confiscation of private property, the abolition of all political and personal freedoms, the Holodomor and mockery of religion, there were too many people who were severely offended by the Soviet government.

"It was necessary to strike a preemptive strike against a potential fifth column, insuring the existing regime in the country from possible upheavals in wartime," writes Aleksey Pavlyukov.

"It was a kind of summing up. A significant part of the country's population was among the offended. They were afraid. Stalin and his entourage wanted to secure themselves in advance," historian Leonid Mlechin believes.

"The fear of an impending war was the main engine of repression. They believed that everyone who was in doubt should be removed," Vyacheslav Nikonov, Molotov's grandson, told Mlechin.

A number of researchers are sure that Stalin was not afraid of the war, but purposefully and carefully prepared it, but in this case it does not matter.

Judging by the results, the terror did not reach its goal. According to minimal estimates, at least 900,000 Soviet citizens served the enemy with weapons in their hands during the war years.

Our contemporaries see this situation differently. Some argue that Stalin arranged the 37th year correctly, and also showed excessive softness, did not destroy all the enemies. Others believe that he would have been better off shooting himself, and given the nature of the regime, there were surprisingly few traitors.

The third task was to solder the nation with iron discipline and fear, to force everyone to work hard for a pittance, to do not what is profitable or pleasant, but what the state needs.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has turned into a dictatorship over the people, who without exception have been turned into a proletariat in the most direct sense of the word - deprived of property and rights, doing work at the discretion of the owner and receiving just enough not to starve to death, or die if the owner so decides. The technique was developed in ancient times. The trick was different - to make the slaves sing in chorus, and even sing with rapture: "I don’t know another such country where a person breathes so freely Igor Bunich, historian

In 1940, the USSR adopted such ferocious anti-worker legislation that the most odious right-wing dictatorships did not know.

The Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of June 26 "On the Prohibition of Unauthorized Leaving Enterprises and Institutions," following the deprivation of passports by collective farmers, turned most of the country's population into serfs and introduced criminal liability for being late for work more than 20 minutes.

In the seven pre-war years, about six million people were sent to camps and prisons in the USSR. There were approximately 25% of "enemies of the people" and criminals among them, and 57% were imprisoned for being late, "screwing up" a detail, failing to comply with the mandatory norm of workdays and other similar "crimes".

The Decree of October 2 "On State Labor Reserves" made tuition in the upper grades of secondary school paid, and for poor children from the age of 14 provided for "factory training" in combination with the fulfillment of adult production standards. The direction to the FZU was officially called a "conscription", and for escaping from there they were sent to camps.

According to historian Igor Bunich, after 1937, Stalin created a kind of state-masterpiece: everyone was in business, and no one dared to utter a word.

"Good job"

The party created by Lenin did not suit Stalin at all. A noisy, shaggy-bearded gang in leather jackets, greedy and always arguing with the leadership, constantly dreaming of moving the center of the world revolution from such an uncultured and dirty place as Moscow to Berlin or Paris, where they rode two or three times a year under various pretexts - such the party had to leave the stage, and leave quickly. The Stalinist nomenklatura was placed in a different framework. Raised by a thoughtful system of privileges to a standard of living unthinkable for the people, having virtually unlimited power over this people, she was well aware of her own insignificance Igor Bunich, historian

In February 1935, Yezhov was appointed one of the three secretaries of the Central Committee, responsible for organizational and personnel work, and chairman of the Party Control Commission, from that moment second only to Molotov in the number of meetings with Stalin.

The appointment of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs on September 26, 1936 was formally a demotion for him and was due to the special role assigned to him by Stalin.

According to historians, the former Chekist elite believed that the main work had already been done, and it was possible to slow down. It was Yezhov who was called upon to reverse these sentiments.

As early as December 1, 1934, after the assassination of Kirov, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR adopted a resolution according to which cases "on the preparation or commission of terrorist acts" were to be investigated "in an expedited manner", and death sentences were to be carried out immediately without the right to appeal.

The fate of people began to be decided by "troikas", often in "packs", without the right to defense, and often in the absence of the accused.

Instead of the OGPU and the republican people's commissariats of internal affairs, the allied NKVD was formed.

The founder of the Gulag and the organizer of cases against Lenin's former comrades-in-arms Heinrich Yagoda Stalin, however, considered insufficiently energetic and decisive. He retained the remnants of reverence for the "old guard", at least he did not want to torture them.

On September 25, 1936, Stalin, while relaxing in Sochi with Andrei Zhdanov, sent a telegram to the members of the Politburo: “We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent to appoint Comrade Yezhov to the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda was clearly not up to the task of exposing the Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc The OGPU was 4 years late in this matter."

The next day Yezhov's appointment took place.

At the first meeting with the leadership of the people's commissariat, he showed his two fists to those present: "Don't look that I'm short. My hands are strong - Stalin's. I will imprison and shoot everyone, regardless of rank and rank, who dares to slow down the deal with the enemies of the people" .

Soon he wrote a report to Stalin: “Many shortcomings have been revealed in the NKVD that cannot be tolerated any longer. Among the leading elite of the Chekists, moods of complacency, calmness and bragging are growing more and more. Instead of drawing conclusions from the Trotskyist case and criticizing their own shortcomings, people dream only about orders for a solved case."

Yezhov said that he had fulfilled Stalin's order and reviewed the lists of those arrested in the latest cases: "It will be necessary to shoot quite an impressive amount. I think we should go for this and put an end to this scum once and for all."

In February-March 1937, a plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks took place, which lasted a week and a half - longer than any other in history - and was almost entirely devoted to the fight against "enemies of the people." Most of its participants were soon repressed themselves, despite the fact that they unconditionally supported Stalin's line.

For several months I do not remember a case when one of the business executives, leaders of the people's commissariats, on their own initiative, would call and say: "Comrade Yezhov, such and such a person is suspicious to me." Most often, when you raise the question of the arrest of a traitor, a Trotskyist, comrades, on the contrary, try to defend these people From Yezhov’s speech at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b)

On May 22, the arrest of Marshal Tukhachevsky marked the beginning of a mass purge of the command corps.

On August 1, the secret order of the NKVD No. 00447 came into force, which designated former "kulaks", "members of anti-Soviet parties", "members of rebel, fascist, espionage formations", "Trotskyites", "churchmen" as the "target group" of repressions.

The order established orders for all regions of the Soviet Union on the number of those arrested and "convicted in the first category."

The document said that "the investigation is carried out in a simplified and expedited manner," and its main task is to identify all the connections of the arrested person.

75 million rubles were allocated for the operation.

obedient tool

The first mass executions in pursuance of Yezhov's order took place at the Butovo training ground in the Moscow region on August 8, 1937. In 1937-1938, about 20 thousand people were killed there alone.

Initially, it was planned to shoot 76,000 people and send 200,000 people to the Gulag, but requests to "increase the limit" rained down from the secretaries of the regional committees and heads of the NKVD departments. According to reports, Stalin did not refuse anyone.

In the 1950s, there were rumors that at the corresponding address of the head of the party organization of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, he imposed a resolution: "Calm down, fool!", But there is no evidence for this.

In December, the NKVD reported on preliminary results: 555,641 arrested and 553,362 convicted. Of these, 239,252 were sentenced to death (former kulaks - 105,124; criminals - 36,063; "other counter-revolutionary elements" - 78,237; 138 588, criminals - 75 950, "other counter-revolutionary elements" - 83 591, without specifying the group - 16 001).

In total, over 18 months, the NKVD arrested 1 million 548 thousand 366 people for political reasons. An average of one and a half thousand people were shot a day. In 1937, 93,000 people were executed for "espionage" alone.

Many believed that evil comes from a little man, who was called "Stalin's people's commissar." In fact, everything was the opposite. Of course, Yezhov tried, but it's not about him Ilya Ehrenburg, writer

Stalin signed 383 lists for "sanctions of the first category", containing 44,465 names. In just one day, December 12, 1938, Stalin and Molotov sent 3,167 people to their deaths.

On the next confession knocked out by the investigators, Stalin imposed a resolution: "Persons marked by me in the text with the letters" Ar. "should be arrested if they are not already arrested." On Yezhov's list of people who are "checked for arrest": "It is necessary not to check, but to arrest."

Molotov wrote on the testimony of an old party member that did not satisfy him: "Beat, beat, beat."

In 1937-1938, according to the "Journal of Visits", Yezhov visited the leader almost 290 times and spent a total of about 850 hours with him.

Georgy Dimitrov wrote in his diary that at a banquet on November 7, 1937, Stalin said: "We will not only destroy all enemies, but we will destroy their families, their entire family to the last generation."

As Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, Yezhov "understood that Stalin was using him like a club, and filled his conscience with vodka."

At a solemn meeting in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD in December 1937, Anastas Mikoyan made a report: "Learn from Comrade Yezhov, as he studied and is studying from Comrade Stalin. The NKVD has done a good job during this time!".

Scapegoat

Stalin affectionately called his entourage "Blackberry", often invited him to the dacha and played chess with him.

On October 27, 1936, Yezhov was introduced to the Politburo as a candidate, on January 27, 1937 he received the new rank of General Commissar of State Security with marshal's stars on blue buttonholes, and on July 17 - the Order of Lenin. The city of Sulimov in the North Caucasus was renamed Yezhovo-Cherkessk.

"People's poet of Kazakhstan" Dzhambul composed a poem: "Ezhov lay in wait for all poisonous snakes and smoked reptiles from holes and lairs!". The Kukryniksy published in Pravda the famous drawing "Hedgehogs", in which the people's commissar strangled a three-headed hydra with a swastika at the end of its tail.

Lordly love, especially the love of a dictator, is short-lived. The change of command had an obvious plus for Stalin: Yezhov and his people could be blamed for all the "excesses" and mistakes. And people saw how fair Stalin was, how difficult it was for him when there were so many enemies around Leonid Mlechin, historian

However, already at the beginning of 1938, Yezhov began to fall out of favor.

As former high-ranking Chekist Mikhail Shreider testified, once, after drinking at the dacha, the people's commissar opened up with his subordinates: "All power is in our hands. ".

According to the researchers, Stalin did not like Yezhov's attempts to publish a book under his own name, extolling his struggle against "Zinovievism", and to become part-time editor of the journal "Party Construction", as well as his proposal to rename Moscow to Stalinodar. The leader believed that the people's commissar should mind his own business, and not self-promotion.

But the main reason for the disgrace was the well-known phrase: "The Moor has done his job - the Moor can leave."

The last time Yezhov was praised from a high rostrum was from the lips of the secretary of the Central Committee, Andrei Zhdanov, at a solemn meeting on the day of the next anniversary of Lenin's death in January 1938.

On January 9, the Central Committee adopted a resolution "On the facts of incorrect dismissal from work of relatives of persons arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes", and on January 14 - "On the mistakes of party organizations in the exclusion of communists from the party." At the plenum held on the same day, Yezhov's name was not mentioned, but the speakers urged "not to accuse people indiscriminately" and "to distinguish those who make mistakes from wreckers."

On April 8, Yezhov was made part-time people's commissar of water transport, where he was also given the opportunity to make some noise in connection with the "method of the Stakhanovist Blindman."

On August 22, Lavrenty Beria was appointed Yezhov's first deputy, who immediately began to take control. Orders on the people's commissariat began to come out for two signatures.

In November, the head of the Ivanovo department of the NKVD, Valentin Zhuravlev, sent a letter to the Politburo with accusations against Yezhov, which, under the then conditions, he would not have dared to do without a go-ahead from above.

Enemies of the people, who made their way into the NKVD, perverted Soviet laws, carried out massive unjustified arrests, at the same time saving their accomplices, especially those who had settled in the NKVD.

Zhuravlev soon headed the capital's administration, and following the discussion of the letter on November 17, a devastating resolution was adopted.

On November 23, Yezhov submitted to Stalin a request for resignation, in which he asked "not to touch my 70-year-old old mother." The letter ended with the words: "Despite all these big shortcomings and blunders in my work, I must say that under the daily leadership of the Central Committee of the NKVD, they defeated the enemies great."

On November 25, Yezhov was relieved of his post as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs (the report in Pravda and Izvestia appeared only on December 9).

Approximately two weeks before his removal from the Lubyanka, Stalin ordered Yezhov to hand over to him personally all the compromising material on top leaders.

On January 10, 1939, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Molotov, officially reprimanded Yezhov for being late for work. Anticipating the end, he drank heavily.

On April 9, Yezhov was removed from the post of People's Commissar for Water Transport. The next day, he was personally arrested by Beria in the office of Georgy Malenkov, secretary of the Central Committee, and sent to the Sukhanov special prison.

In certain circles of society, Beria has since had a reputation as a man who restored "socialist legitimacy" Yakov Etinger, historian

About 150,000 people were released, mostly technical and military specialists needed by the state, including future commanders of the Great Patriotic War Konstantin Rokossovsky, Kirill Meretskov and Alexander Gorbatov. But there were also ordinary people, for example, the grandfather of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Compared to the scale of repression, this was a drop in the ocean. But the propaganda effect was partly achieved: justice triumphs, we don’t get jailed in vain!

February 4, 1940 Yezhov was shot. He was accused of working for Polish and German intelligence, preparing a coup d'etat and the assassination of Stalin, allegedly planned for November 7, 1938, as well as homosexuality, which since 1935 was recognized as a criminal offense in the USSR.

Like most arrested high-ranking party members, Yezhov repented intensely. “Despite the severity of the conclusions that I deserved and accept on the basis of party duty, I assure you in good conscience that I will remain loyal to the party, comrade Stalin, to the end,” he wrote to Beria from Sukhanovka.

On the eve of the trial, Beria arrived at the prison and had a private conversation with Yezhov.

“Yesterday, in a conversation with Beria, he told me: “Don’t think that you will definitely be shot. If you confess and tell everything honestly, your life will be saved," Yezhov said in his last speech.

He also called Marshals Budyonny and Shaposhnikov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov and Prosecutor General Vyshinsky "enemies of the people", and also said that he "purged 14,000 Chekists, but my great fault lies in the fact that I purged them little." In fact, the number of NKVD workers arrested under Yezhov amounted to 1862 people.

According to State Security General Pavel Sudoplatov, Yezhov, when he was led to his execution, sang the Internationale.

Yezhov's wife, journalist Yevgenia Khayutina, known for her friendship and rumored romance with Isaac Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, took poison on November 21, 1938. Brother Ivan, sister Evdokia and nephews Viktor and Anatoly were shot.

Chekist stokers, working at the furnaces around the clock, with rapture and enthusiasm, after finishing their shift, also turned into fuel for the boilers of a huge ship. How many of them, sparkling with blue buttonholes, chrome-polished boots, creaking with new sword belts, descended into the stoker, not realizing that they would never go on deck again Igor Bunich, historian

At the inexplicable whim of Stalin, another brother, Alexander, was not only not touched, but also left in the position of head of the department of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR.

The adopted daughter of the Yezhovs, Natalia, who at the age of six was sent to a special detention center for the children of "enemies of the people," in 1988 applied to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR with a request for the rehabilitation of her father. The court refused, noting in the ruling that Yezhov, although he was not a conspirator and a spy, had committed grave crimes.

It is not known for certain whether Yezhov was beaten and tortured.

Unlike his own victims, he was dealt with in secret. There were no rallies of angry workers, not even information in the newspapers about the arrest and sentence. Only Khrushchev subsequently reported, without going into details, that "Yezhov got what he deserved."

In 1940, former subordinates of the "iron commissar" spread two rumors about him among the people: that he fell into violent insanity and is chained in a lunatic asylum, and that he hung himself with a sign "I - g ... o" attached to his chest.

Nikolai Yezhov is one of the most sinister figures of the Soviet era. Under his leadership, full-scale purges began in the ranks of the party, which spread to civilians. In addition to repression, Yezhov also collaborated with Western intelligence, so he can rightfully be called a "Bandera man in the NKVD uniform." Yezhov's legacy has not disappeared: today, our special services continue to cooperate with their overseas "colleagues" from the CIA, NSA and FBI, which turns them into frank accomplices, hiding behind the mask of democracy and a fake excuse about the so-called. "partnership". For cooperation with Western (Nazi) intelligence, Yezhov was liquidated on February 4, 1940. One of the main "achievements" of Yezhov was the execution of the highest command of the Red Army, among whom was the most talented military leader M. N. Tukhachevsky. It was Tukhachevsky, in a dispute with Marshal Budyonny, who foresaw that the future war would be a war of machines, while Budyonny argued that it would be a war of cavalry. The conflict between the two military leaders led to the fact that, on the orders of Yezhov, Tukhachevsky was "removed." Stalin's phrase that "cadres decide everything" was automatically crossed out by Yezhov, for which the chief of the NKVD himself paid the most cruel and just way. Today he turns 120 years old.

Accurate data on the parents of the chief of the NKVD has not been preserved. According to the confession of the deceased, he claimed that he was born in St. Petersburg, in the family of a Russian foundry worker. In the questionnaires for 1922 and 1924 he wrote: "I explain myself in Polish and Lithuanian."

A. Pavlyukov, however, points out in his biography of Nikolai Yezhov that his father was a native of the village of Volkhonshchino, Tula province, Ivan Yezhov, who served in Lithuania for military service in the musician team of the 111th Infantry Regiment stationed in the Lithuanian city of Kovno. After serving his term, he stayed there for an extended term, married a local Lithuanian girl, and after retiring, he moved to the neighboring Suwalki province (now partly part of Poland, partly part of Lithuania) and got a “job” in the Zemstvo guard (the police). At the time of the birth of Nikolai, the family, apparently, lived in the village of Veyveri, Mariampolsky district of the specified province (now Lithuania), and three years later, when the father received a promotion and was appointed Zemstvo guard of the Mariampolsky urban area, they moved to Mariampol. Here the boy studied for three years at an elementary school, and in 1906 he was sent to a relative in St. Petersburg to learn tailoring.

He volunteered for the army in June 1915, but a year later he was declared unfit for military service due to weak anthropometric data (Yezhov’s height was only 1.5 meters; only Engelbert Dollfuss (148 cm), one of the Austrian chancellors, who was nicknamed Millimetternich and went down in history as the shortest politician in history). On August 14, Yezhov, who fell ill and was also slightly wounded, was sent to the rear. He did not differ in good health: even while serving in the army, he was constantly sick. In general, as they would say today, Yezhov's health is the health of a mattress.

In April 1919, he was called up for service in the Red Army, sent to the Saratov base of radio formations (later - the 2nd Kazan base), where he first served as a private, and then as a scribe under the commissar of the base management. In October 1919, he took the post of commissar of the school where radio specialists were trained, in April 1921 he became the commissar of the base, at the same time he was elected deputy head of the propaganda department of the Tatar regional committee of the RCP (b).

In July 1921, he married Antonina Titova, with whose help, after the wedding, he was transferred to Moscow for party work after 2 months. Yezhov's career rapidly went up:

1922, March - October - Executive Secretary of the Mari Regional Committee of the RCP (b), having served in October 1922 on vacation, Yezhov did not return back.
1923, March - 1924 - Executive Secretary of the Semipalatinsk Provincial Committee of the RCP (b), it is alleged that Valerian Kuibyshev sent him to Kazakhstan.
1924-1925 - head. organizational department of the Kirghiz regional committee of the CPSU (b),
1925-1926 - deputy. executive secretary of the Kazak regional committee of the CPSU (b), worked under the supervision of F. I. Goloshchekin.
The head of the organizational department, I. M. Moskvin, spoke of his subordinate as follows:
“I don’t know a more ideal worker than Yezhov. Or rather, not a worker, but a performer. Having entrusted him with something, you can not check and be sure that he will do everything. Yezhov has only one, however, a significant drawback: he does not know how to stop Sometimes there are situations when it is impossible to do something, you have to stop. Yezhov does not stop. And sometimes you have to follow him in order to stop him in time ... "

Such a review served more as a warning than a praise, because Moskvin was far from being a fool and he foresaw that people like Yezhov would sooner or later begin to abuse their powers and completely get out of the control of the authorities. Yezhov was a typical labor fanatic rather than a conscientious worker, so it is not surprising that he was eventually disposed of. As the saying goes "according to merit and honor."

During the year he was Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture of the USSR, and in November 1930 he returned to the Orgraspredotdel already in charge, taking the place of his former boss, who was transferred to the post of Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. It was in November 1930 that Yezhov met Stalin.

Yezhov was in charge of the organizational department until 1934, putting into practice Stalin's personnel policy. In 1933-1934. He is a member of the Central Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the “purge” of the party. At the 17th Party Congress held in January-February 1934, Yezhov headed the credentials committee. In February 1934, he was elected a member of the Central Committee, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee and deputy chairman of the Party Control Commission under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. From February 1935 - Chairman of the CPC, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

At the end of 1934-1935. Yezhov, at the suggestion of Stalin, in fact, led the investigation into the murder of Kirov and the Kremlin case, linking them to the activities of the former oppositionists - Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. As the historian O. V. Khlevnyuk testifies, on this basis, Yezhov actually entered into a conspiracy against the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the NKVD Yagoda and his supporters with one of Yagoda's deputies, Y. S. Agranov, so, in 1936, Agranov at a meeting in the NKVD reported:

“Yezhov summoned me to his dacha. It must be said that this meeting was of a conspiratorial nature. Yezhov conveyed Stalin’s instructions on the mistakes made by the investigation into the case of the Trotskyist center, and instructed me to take measures to open the Trotskyist center, to reveal a clearly undiscovered terrorist gang and personal Trotsky's role in this matter. Yezhov raised the question in such a way that either he himself would convene an operational meeting, or I would intervene in this matter. Yezhov's instructions were specific and gave the correct starting thread to solve the case.

On September 26, 1936, he was appointed People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, replacing Heinrich Yagoda in this post. On October 1, 1936, Yezhov signed the first order for the NKVD on his entry into the duties of People's Commissar.

Yezhovshchina: "Red Bandera"

The peak of mass repressions in the USSR, which covered all layers of Soviet society, fell on 1937-1938. By this time, the formation of a totalitarian political system was completed in the USSR. Mass terror, which went down in history as "Yezhovshchina", was intended to complete the Soviet system. Unlike ordinary terror applied by any dictatorship, totalitarian terror was directed not against open opponents of the authorities, but against loyal citizens. Fear and repression make all members of Soviet society defenseless against the ruthless machine of intimidation, deprive them of the ability to think and critically assess reality, turn everyone into “cogs” of a gigantic mechanism, developing vile feelings of betrayal and denunciation.


It was easy to guess what it was like for ordinary people who suffered from the NKVD zombies, who saw the people as an enemy hydra, depicted in the above poster. The chief of the NKVD was exactly 6 years younger than Hitler and the red NKVD terror was in no way inferior to the Gestapo, RSHA and SD terror. Today, both practices (both Soviet and Nazi) have been adopted by American intelligence agencies, whose methods have long surpassed both Soviet and Nazi figures and represent the most monstrous methods of interrogation in the history of mankind. So I would not be surprised if sober people in the West across the ocean begin to literally arrange lynching of their own special services. Let me remind you that the population of the United States has 300 million guns in their hands, and sooner or later they will start shooting, so you can be sure of the scale of the bloodbath across the ocean.

The "Great Terror" of 1937 was in many respects the price to pay for the forced expansion of the constitutional rights of citizens under the new Constitution, the elimination of the categories of the deprived. In order to finally stabilize the regime, Stalin had to atomize society, destroy the latent remnants of civilian structures, decisively root out any dissent, independent interest groups. After the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Stalin had reason to fear the growth of opposition sentiments. For him, the physical destruction of the intelligentsia-opposition part of the ruling elite was the only condition for the successful implementation of the reorganization of society. At the same time, it was a way to get rid of the part of the party bureaucracy that became bourgeois during the NEP years, the opportunity to attribute all the mistakes and failures of the authorities to it, as well as a way to rotate the party elite in the absence of a democratic mechanism for its renewal. Undoubtedly, by giving the go-ahead to the mass “purge”, Stalin and his entourage hoped to eliminate any possibility of the emergence of a “fifth column” in the country due to the danger of an impending war.

Speaking at the plenum of the Central Committee in June 1937, Yezhov argued that "there is a conspiratorial underground, the country is on the verge of a new Civil War, and only state security agencies under the wise leadership of I.V. Stalin are able to prevent it." A few weeks later, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks suggested that the secretaries of local party organizations take into account all the kulaks and criminals who returned to their homeland, and the most hostile of them should immediately be arrested and shot "in the order of administrative conduct of their cases through troikas." Following that, the top leadership of the country demanded that within five days the composition of the "triples" be submitted to the Central Committee, as well as the number of people to be shot and evicted. Usually the "troikas" included the secretary of the party committee, the head of the board of the NKVD and the prosecutor. All territories and regions received orders - how many people they should have arrested. The arrested were divided into two categories: the first was immediately shot, the second was imprisoned for 8-10 years in prison or camp. But since the end of August, local leaders have been demanding that the Central Committee increase the limits on repression. As a result, only for the first category, the limit was increased from 259,450 people to another 22.5 thousand. Numerous actions carried out in 1937-1938 do not at all testify to the spontaneous nature of the "Great Terror". by the NKVD: the arrest of all Germans who worked at the country's defense plants, the mass expulsion of "unreliable elements" from the border regions, numerous lawsuits in the center and in the field.

The Kazakh poet Dzhambul Dzhabaev dedicated one of his poems to People's Commissar Yezhov:

"In the sparkle of lightning you became familiar to us,
Yezhov, a sharp-eyed and intelligent people's commissar.
Great Lenin's wise word
It raised the hero Yezhov for the battle."

If the poet knew which dog Stalin unleashed in the ranks of the NKVD, then perhaps he would not have written such praise. Almost 1.5 million people were hit by Yezhov's car.
In his new post, Yezhov coordinated and carried out repressions against persons suspected of anti-Soviet activities, espionage (Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), "purges" in the party, mass arrests and deportations on social, organizational, and then national grounds. These campaigns took on a systematic character from the summer of 1937, they were preceded by preparatory repressions in the state security agencies themselves, which were “cleansed” of Yagoda’s employees. On March 2, 1937, in a report at the plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, he sharply criticized his subordinates, pointing out failures in intelligence and investigative work. The plenum approved the report and instructed Yezhov to restore order in the organs of the NKVD. Of the state security officers from October 1, 1936 to August 15, 1938, 2273 people were arrested, of which 1862 were arrested for "counter-revolutionary crimes". ".

In addition, lists were compiled of high-ranking "enemies of the people" subject to trial by a military tribunal. The verdict was announced in advance - execution. Yezhov sent these execution lists to Stalin, Molotov and other members of the Politburo for approval. Only on December 12, 1938, Stalin and Molotov authorized the execution of 3,167 people. By the beginning of 1938, Stalin, apparently, already believed that Yezhov had fulfilled his task (especially since the process of mass repressions began to get out of the control of his creator; having unleashed total terror in the country, the authorities themselves were under attack). The signal for the cessation of mass repressions was the decision of the Central Committee and the government "On arrests, prosecutorial supervision and investigation." It spoke of "the biggest shortcomings and perversions in the work of the NKVD." The resolution eliminated the "troikas" and required arrests to be made only with the approval of the court or the prosecutor. Stalin shifted the responsibility for all "excesses and mistakes" to Yezhov and his people. On November 25, 1938, L.P. Beria was appointed the new People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. The new head of the NKVD begins his activities with amnesties. Yezhov was accused of "treacherous, espionage views, connections with the Polish and German intelligence services and the ruling circles of Poland, Germany, England and Japan hostile to the USSR," of plotting and preparing a coup d'état scheduled for November 7, 1938. February 4, 1940 by the verdict of the military collegium of the Supreme Court, he was shot. After Stalin's go-ahead, some of the most zealous party functionaries in the center and in the localities were also shot, who, like P. P. Postyshev, still thirsted for a lot of blood.

L. P. BERIA'S MESSAGE TO I. V. STALIN ABOUT N. I. EZHOV WITH THE APPENDIX OF THE INTERROGATION PROTOCOL
April 27, 1939 No. 1268/6 Top secret Comrade STALIN
At the same time, I am sending you the protocol of interrogation of Yezhov dated April 26, 1939. The interrogation continues.

People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria

PROTOCOL OF THE INTERROGATION OF THE ARRESTED EZHOV NIKOLAY IVANOVICH
dated April 26, 1939
EZHOV N. I., born in 1895, a native of the mountains. Leningrad, a former member of the CPSU (b) since 1917. Prior to arrest - People's Commissar of Water Transport.

QUESTION: During the previous interrogation, you testified that for ten years you were doing espionage work in favor of Poland. However, you have hidden a number of your espionage connections. The investigation requires you to provide truthful and exhaustive testimony on this matter.
ANSWER: I must admit that, having given truthful testimony about my espionage work in favor of Poland, I really concealed my espionage connection with the Germans from the investigation.
QUESTION: For what purpose did you try to divert the investigation from your espionage connection with the Germans?
ANSWER: I didn’t want to show during the investigation about my direct espionage connection with the Germans, especially since my cooperation with German intelligence is not limited to espionage work on behalf of German intelligence, I organized an anti-Soviet conspiracy and prepared a coup d’état through terrorist acts against the leaders of the party and government .
QUESTION: State all your espionage connections that you tried to hide from the investigation, and the circumstances of your recruitment.
ANSWER: As an agent of German intelligence, I was recruited in 1934 under the following circumstances: in the summer of 1934 I was sent abroad to Vienna for treatment to Professor NORDEN...
QUESTION: Who recruited you?
ANSWER: I was recruited for cooperation with German intelligence by Dr. ENGLER, who is a senior assistant to NORDEN.
ANSWER: After the recruitment was completed, I asked ENGLER to inform me with whom and how I would be connected. Engler replied that he himself was a German military intelligence officer.
QUESTION: What tasks did ENGLER give you after recruitment?
ANSWER: First of all, Engler gave me the task of rendering every possible assistance in the speediest resolution of the question of his invitation to Moscow. I promised Engler to take all possible measures to expedite this matter.
QUESTION: Did you hand over to ENGLER for German intelligence any information representing a specially guarded state secret of the Soviet Union?
ANSWER: During my direct contact with ENGLER in Vienna, and then in Bad Gastein (radioactive water resort in Austria), where he twice came to contact me, I informed Engler only about the general situation of the Soviet Union and the Red Army, in which he was especially interested.
QUESTION: You evade a direct answer. The investigation is interested in the question, what kind of espionage information did you pass on to ENGLER?
ANSWER: Within the limits of what I knew from memory, I told ENGLER everything about the state of armament and combat readiness of the Red Army, especially emphasizing the bottlenecks in the combat readiness of the Red Army. I told Engler that the Red Army was far behind in terms of artillery, both in terms of the quality of artillery weapons and in quantity, and was significantly inferior to the artillery weapons of the advanced capitalist countries.
Concerning the general economic situation in the USSR, I told Engler about the difficulties of collective-farm construction and the major problems in the industrialization of the country, focusing in particular on the slow development of newly built enterprises. I illustrated this by the example of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, where by the time production was mastered, a significant part of the valuable equipment had already been put out of action. Consequently, I declared to ENGLER, the successes in the field of industrialization of the USSR are doubtful.
Further, I informed Engler of the enormous disproportion in the growth of individual branches of industry, which had a strong effect on the general economic situation of the country. I especially emphasized the lag in the group of non-ferrous metals and special alloys, which hampered the development of the combat effectiveness of the Red Army.
QUESTION: Where did your appearances take place?
ANSWER: In all cases when it was necessary for me to convey this or that espionage information, the meetings took place at my apartment. THAI came to me under the guise of checking my health.
QUESTION: What espionage assignments did you receive from the THAI?
ANSWER: According to TAITS, ENGLER was mainly interested in secret information about the weapons of the Red Army and all data on the state of the USSR's defense capability. At that time I was in charge of the industrial department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and at the same time was deputy chairman of the Party Control Commission, which I actually supervised.
There was a military group in the Party Control Commission headed by N. KUIBYSHEV. The work of the group and its materials were of a strictly secret nature, and therefore the group was subordinate to me. The materials that were compiled by the CPC military group on the status or examination of one or another type of troops and weapons were sent only to the Defense Committee and to me. As a rule, I periodically took all these documents with me to the apartment and, during a visit to the TAITS, I handed them over to him for a short time, after which he returned them to me.
I know that TAIZ photographed most of these notes and handed them over to them.
QUESTION: Did he tell you about it?
ANSWER: Yes, once I asked how and where he transmits the information he receives from me. TAITZ told me that he was passing this information in a photographed form to a certain person in the German embassy, ​​who was already forwarding these photographs to German intelligence.
QUESTION: And how did he get into the German embassy?
ANSWER: In addition to his main work in the Lechsan department of the Kremlin, the doctor TAITs also served the employees of the German embassy in Moscow.
QUESTION: Do you remember the nature of the information you gave to the TAITS?
ANSWER: Yes, I remember.
QUESTION: Be specific.
ANSWER: During my relationship with Dr. TAITZ, I have been handed over a large number of memorandums and information on weapons, clothing and food supplies, the moral and political state and combat training of the Red Army. These materials provided an exhaustive numerical and factual description of one or another type of troops, types of weapons and the state of military districts.
During the same time, I provided TAITS with information about the progress and shortcomings of the rearmament of military aviation, about the slow introduction of new, more advanced models of aircraft, about the accident rate of military aircraft, the plan for training flight personnel and performance data characterizing the quality and quantity of aircraft engines we produce. and aircraft.
In addition, through TAITSA, I transmitted to the German intelligence the data available to the CPC on the state of the tank armament of the Red Army. I drew the attention of the Germans to the poor quality of Soviet armor and the failure to switch tanks to a diesel engine instead of the aircraft engine used at that time.
Further, I handed over to TAITZ comprehensive data on the major shortcomings in the field of clothing and food supply and storage facilities of the Red Army. By the way, a special meeting was held in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on these issues, the decision of which I also brought to the attention of German intelligence.
The materials I reported gave a clear picture of the situation in this important branch of the military economy. From them it was clear that at the very beginning of the war the Red Army would face serious difficulties.
I handed over similar materials to TAITS on the state of chemical, small arms, engineering weapons of the Red Army, in addition, individual materials characterizing the state of combat training and the political and moral state of the units of the Leningrad, Belorussian. Volga and Central Asian military districts, which were examined by the CPC.
ANSWER: ENGLER came into my room and said: "I want to examine you," and immediately he informed me that Hammerstein was to meet with me.
My meeting with Hammerstein was organized by Engler under the guise of a joint walk with Engler in Merano Park. In one of the pavilions, as if by chance, we met Hammerstein, to whom Engler introduced me, after which we continued our walk together.
HAMMERSTEIN at the beginning of the conversation stated: "We are very grateful for all the services you provide us." He declared that he was pleased with the information the Germans had received from me. But, said Hammerstein, it's all nonsense! The position you occupy in the USSR is such that we cannot be satisfied with the information you convey. You face other tasks, of a political nature.
QUESTION: What are these “political” tasks?
ANSWER: Hammerstein, knowing that I had already been elected Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, declared: "You have the opportunity not only to inform us, but also to influence the policy of the Soviet government."
Further, HAMMERSTEIN informed me of the very serious, in his words, connections that the Germans have in the circles of the high command of the Red Army, and informed me of the existence in the Soviet Union of several military conspiratorial groups.
HAMMERSHTEIN told me that a number of prominent military workers were dissatisfied with the situation that had developed in the USSR and set themselves the goal of changing the domestic and international policy of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet government, under its current policy, HAMMERSHTEIN continued, would inevitably lead the USSR into a military clash with the capitalist states, while this could be completely avoided if the Soviet Union, by making concessions, could "get used" to the European system.
Since Hammerstein did not speak Russian, I asked him through Engler, who played the role of an interpreter, how serious the ties between the leading circles of Germany and representatives of the high command of the Red Army were.
Hammerstein replied: “Various circles of your military are connected with us. They have the same goal, but, apparently, the points of view are different, they can’t agree among themselves in any way, despite our categorical demand.”
QUESTION: What tasks did Hammerstein give you?
ANSWER: HAMMERSTEIN suggested that I get in touch with these military circles, and first of all with EGOROV. He declared that he knew EGOROVA very well, as one of the most important and influential figures among that part of the military conspirators, who understood that without the German army, without a firm agreement with Germany, it would not be possible to change the political system in the USSR in the desired direction.
GAMMERSHTEIN suggested that I, through Egorov, be aware of all conspiratorial affairs and influence the conspiratorial groups existing in the Red Army in the direction of their rapprochement with Germany, while simultaneously taking all measures to "unify" them. “Your position as Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks will help you with this,” said GAMMERSHTEIN.
At this, Hammerstein said goodbye, warning that he would have a few more meetings with me.
QUESTION: On behalf of whom did Hammerstein speak to you?
ANSWER: From the Reichswehr circles in Germany. The fact is that even before Hitler came to power, an opinion was created about Hammerstein as a supporter of the rapprochement of the German army with the Red Army. In 1936-1937. Hammerstein was taken away from direct work in the Reichswehr, but since he, more than other German generals, had connections among the military workers of the USSR, he was entrusted with the conduct of the so-called. "Russian affairs".
QUESTION: Did you have further meetings with HAMMERSHTEIN?
ANSWER: Yes, I had three more meetings with Hammerstein. At the second meeting, Hammerstein was interested in the details connected with the assassination of S. M. Kirov, and the seriousness of the influence of the Trotskyists, Zinovievites and rightists in the CPSU (b).
I gave him exhaustive information, in particular, I noted the fact that confusion is now being observed among the Chekists and that Yagoda's position in connection with the murder of Kirov has been shaken. Then Hammerstein said: "It would be very good if you could take the post of BERRY."
I smiled, answering that "it does not depend on me alone."
My third conversation with the German general concerned the conspiratorial work of the military in the USSR, since civil matters were of less interest to Hammerstein.
The fourth and last meeting with HAMMERSHTEIN took place in a cafe...

QUESTION: The investigation states that you continue to stand on enemy positions and behave insincerely. This means that you:
1. You keep silent about your connections with the Polish intelligence service after 1937.
2. You keep back on the question of your espionage work in favor of Germany.
3. You name either the dead or official employees of foreign embassies as persons involved in your conspiratorial and espionage work.
4. You hide the persons who, together with you, led the treacherous work of organizing a counter-revolutionary coup in the USSR.

"Death frees a person from all problems. No person - no problem" (I. Stalin)

On April 10, 1939, Yezhov was arrested with the participation of Beria and Malenkov in the latter's office. The case of Yezhov, according to Sudoplatov, was conducted personally by Beria and his closest associate Bogdan Kobulov. He was kept in the Sukhanov special prison of the NKVD of the USSR. On April 24, 1939, he wrote a note confessing his homosexual orientation. According to her, he treated her like a vice.

According to the indictment, “preparing a coup d'état, Yezhov trained terrorist cadres through his like-minded conspirators, intending to put them into action at the first opportunity. Yezhov and his accomplices Frinovsky, Evdokimov and Dagin practically prepared a putsch for November 7, 1938, which, according to the plan of his inspirers, was to result in terrorist acts against the leaders of the party and government during a demonstration on Red Square in Moscow. In addition, Yezhov was accused of sodomy, already persecuted under Soviet law (the indictment said that Yezhov committed acts of sodomy "acting for anti-Soviet and selfish purposes").

During the investigation and trial, Yezhov denied all accusations and admitted that his only mistake was that he “little cleaned” the state security organs from “enemies of the people”:
"I cleared 14,000 Chekists, but my great fault lies in the fact that I cleaned them a little."

From the last word of Yezhov:
"At the preliminary investigation, I said that I was not a spy, I was not a terrorist, but they did not believe me and they used severe beatings on me. For 25 years of my party life, I honestly fought enemies and destroyed enemies. I also have such crimes, for which I can be shot, and I will talk about them later, but I did not commit the crimes that I was charged with indictment in my case and am not guilty of them ... I do not deny that I drank, but I worked like an ox ... If If I wanted to carry out a terrorist act on any of the members of the government, I would not recruit anyone for this purpose, but, using technology, I would commit this heinous deed at any moment ... "

On February 3, 1940, Nikolai Yezhov, by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, was sentenced to "an exceptional measure of punishment" - execution; the sentence was carried out the next day, February 4, in the building of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. According to Sudoplatov, "When he was being led to the execution, he sang the Internationale." Before being shot, he shouted: "Long live Stalin!" The body was cremated in the Donskoy crematorium.

Photo caption: "No person, no problem"

Nevertheless, until the death of Stalin, terror remains an indispensable attribute of the Soviet system. Very indicative in this regard is a note sent by the leader to the factory in Kovrov during the Finnish campaign with a threat to shoot "all the bastards who have settled in the factory if the production of a new disk for the Degtyarev assault rifle is not launched there within three days."

The "Great Terror" achieved the goals that were basically intuitively assigned to it by the Stalinist leadership. More than 500,000 new workers were promoted to leadership positions, and power was redistributed from the hands of the old guard into the hands of Stalinist nominees, who were boundlessly devoted to their leader. At the same time, mass repressions had a detrimental effect on all aspects of the life of Soviet society, primarily on the economy and the country's defense capability. During the "great terror" many leading designers, engineers and technicians were arrested and destroyed. Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence were crushed. In the country in the period from 1937 to 1940, the production of tractors, automobiles, and other complex equipment was reduced. In fact, the country was divided into two large camps: those who were at large and who were not affected by the repressions, and those who were in the camps or were relatives of the convicts. In percentage terms, the second group was more numerous.

Marshal of the USSR A.M. Vasilevsky later recalled:

“Without the thirty-seventh year, perhaps there would have been no war at all in 1941. In the fact that Hitler decided to start a war ... an important role was played by the assessment of the degree of defeat of the military personnel that we had.

It seems that not only Vasilevsky was right, but also Tukhachevsky, who foresaw the war of machines. The defeat of the military personnel led to the fact that the Red Army received a powerful weather rebuff in Finland, losing about 200 thousand of its people in the harsh Finnish winter.

M.N. Tukhachevsky.

Tukhachevsky case

The case of Tukhachevsky - the case of an "anti-Soviet Trotskyist military organization" - is a case on trumped-up charges of a group of top Soviet military leaders accused of organizing a military conspiracy to seize power. It was the beginning of mass repressions in the Red Army.

The defendants belonged to a group of senior Soviet military leaders who negatively assessed the activities of K. E. Voroshilov as People's Commissar of Defense. They believed that in the conditions of the preparation of the USSR for a major war, Voroshilov's incompetence had a negative impact on the process of technical and structural modernization of the Red Army.

A similar case was being developed by the OGPU back in 1930: it was alleged that a group of major military leaders headed by Tukhachevsky was preparing to seize power and assassinate Stalin (testimonies were obtained from the arrested teachers of the Military Academy Kakurin and Troitsky). But Stalin did not give him a move. In mid-October of the same year, Tukhachevsky confronted Kakurin and Troitsky; Tukhachevsky was found not guilty.

One of the first repressed military men was Guy G.D., who was arrested in 1935 for saying in a private conversation while drunk that “Stalin must be removed, they will remove him anyway.” Soon he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 5 years in the camps, but he escaped when transferred to the Yaroslavl prison on October 22, 1935. To capture him, the NKVD mobilized up to several thousand Chekists, Komsomol members and collective farmers to create a continuous ring with a radius of 100 kilometers; Guy was caught two days later.

In June 1937, a trial also took place over a group of senior officers of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the so-called. "The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Military Organization". The defendants were accused of planning a military coup on May 15, 1937.

By the ruling of January 31, 1957 (Determination No. 4n-0280/57 of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR), all the defendants were acquitted and rehabilitated due to the lack of corpus delicti. The new decision was based on evidence that the confessions of the defendants, on which the guilty verdict was based, were obtained using torture, beatings and other "criminal methods of conducting an investigation." The Ruling states, in particular: “The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, having studied the materials of the case and additional verification, considers it indisputably established that the criminal case against Tukhachevsky, Kork, Yakir and others on charges of anti-Soviet activities was falsified.”

Thus ended the life of one of the bloody figures of the Stalin era, Nikolai Yezhov. In 1998, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized Nikolai Yezhov as not subject to rehabilitation:
"Yezhov ... organized a series of murders of persons he did not like, including his wife Yezhova E. S., who could expose his treacherous activities.

Yezhov ... provoked an aggravation of relations between the USSR and friendly countries and tried to speed up military clashes between the USSR and Japan.
As a result of operations carried out by the NKVD in accordance with the orders of Yezhov, only in 1937-1938. more than 1.5 million citizens were subjected to repressions, of which about half were shot.

Summing up the analysis of the personality of Yezhov and Yezhovism, it is worth noting that history tends to repeat itself. Stalin was against any cooperation with foreign intelligence services from the very beginning and having noticed Yezhov's anti-state activities in time, he removed him. And the fact that our intelligence services are still maintaining a dialogue with the American intelligence services (and even being trained in the USA) completely discredits them in the eyes of their people and turns them not into law enforcement officers, but into the most ordinary accomplices, ready to do anything to protect their overseas owner and his interests. One dead man (whose name I will not name) once said golden words:

"When the state becomes a criminal, the right to be a judge belongs to EVERY citizen"

So God save us from Bandera in uniform and their overseas shepherds, and we will cope with our troubles without outside help.

"The past years of the red dictatorship have passed,
Dissolved in the past of the prisoners of the figure.
Only the wanderer-wind remembers by name
Those that were taken away in the Stolypin wagons.

He flies around the world and cries about it,
About the torment of the dead, he composed a song-groan.
And, being born somewhere, its echo roams,
In the souls disturbing the memory of the fallen ...

Red terror...

"Iron People's Commissar" was sentenced to death already at the time of his appointment to a high position

"Yezhovshchina" is a biting Soviet word that appeared in the domestic press in 1939. The same people who two years earlier sang the praises of the "iron commissar" began to hoot contemptuously, seeing him off to trial and execution. The best of the assistants Nikolai Yezhov, personally tortured the former boss, knocking out of him confessions of treason.

What happened? Why Joseph Stalin(and without him such decisions were not made) gave the order to destroy a man who fought his enemies more fiercely than anyone else?

Executioner instead of a businessman

To understand why Stalin needed Yezhov at all, it is necessary to figure out who was the predecessor Nikolai Ivanovich and where did this predecessor go.

Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda headed the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs from the day the department was created in 1934, and before that for several years he was the actual head of the OGPU (the formal head of the Office Vyacheslav Menzhinsky the last few years of his life he hardly got out of bed). Member of the RSDLP since 1907, faithful comrade, unbending revolutionary, friend Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, it was he who stood at the beginning of what is now called mass repression. No, and before that times were by no means vegetarian, but Yagoda put the fight against objectionable elements not only on a mass basis, but also on a commercial basis. The main directorate of the camps, the Gulag, is Yagoda's masterpiece of thought: from ordinary penal colonies and death camps, he built a well-thought-out production system that became an essential part of the Soviet economy.

Yagoda's methods of work did not suit many party members, they objected to his appointment to the highest police position, but the murder Sergei Kirov in December 1934, everything was written off: the flywheel of repression was launched. The loudest deed of Yagoda's time was the defeat of the "opposition Zinoviev - Kamenev”: the bullets with which these former leaders of the Soviet state were shot, Yagoda kept as a keepsake. Subsequently, Yagoda took up the "criminal group Bukharin - Rykov”, but only managed to start the business: a little later he would be shot as a member of the same “criminal group”.

At the same time, Yagoda himself was an opponent of executions: he treated those arrested with the prudence of a good owner. In his view, the punitive-corrective system was supposed to work for the good of the country, and not waste human material. The White Sea Canal, for the construction of which Yagoda received the Order of Lenin with the help of prisoners, was distinguished by a relatively mild (by Soviet standards) regime, there were still methods of encouraging prisoners, preferential offsets for the term; the best-performing convict workers even received state awards. There is no doubt that Yagoda would have become a big businessman in the West; even from the USSR, according to some reports, he managed to arrange an illegal supply of timber to the United States with payment credited to his Swiss account.

Of course, the businessman could not fulfill Stalin's task - the elimination of a whole generation of Bolsheviks in order to start building the system from scratch. Therefore, the executioner came to replace him.

Great terror

Almost all members of the Stalinist elite were people of extremely short stature (165 cm Yagoda remained one of the tallest in that government), but Yezhov stood out even among them: 151 centimeters! The lack of physical data, however, did not prevent him from having an incredible capacity for work. One of the leaders of the young Yezhov wrote in the early 1930s:

“I do not know a more ideal worker than Yezhov. Or rather, not an employee, but a performer. Having entrusted him with something, you can not check and be sure - he will do everything. Yezhov has only one, however, a significant drawback: he does not know how to stop. Sometimes there are situations when it is impossible to do something, you have to stop. Yezhov - does not stop. And sometimes you have to watch him in order to stop him in time.

In 1936, Yagoda was transferred to the Commissariat of Communications. Stalin then wrote to his comrades in the Politburo:

“We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent to appoint comrade Yezhov was promoted to the post of People's Commissar. Yagoda was clearly not up to the task of exposing the Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc of the OGPU, he was 4 years late in this matter. All party workers and the majority of regional representatives of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs speak about this.

The most terrible years in the history of the USSR began. Unlike Yagoda, who, apparently, did not even personally participate in torture, Nikolai Yezhov put the beatings on stream; insufficiently zealous investigators themselves became victims. Mass repressions went from September 1936 to October 1938.

Having settled into his new position, Yezhov became the No. 3 man in the Soviet hierarchy - he was only closer to the leader Vyacheslav Molotov. For 1937-1938. Yezhov entered Stalin's office 290 times - and the average duration of the meeting was almost three hours. This, by the way, is an answer to those who believe that Stalin “knew nothing” about torture and repression. It was impossible not to know: for example, at the beginning of 1935, 37 people in the USSR had the title of state security commissars - they held high positions, they were afraid and considered omnipotent, the appointment of each of them was personally approved by Stalin. Two of these 37 survived until the spring of 1940.

At the same time, there was a second wave of repressions against the kulaks (by that time they had long been former), as well as sweeps in the national republics and autonomies. In general, during Yezhov's work at the head of the people's commissariat, 681,692 people were shot on political charges alone, and even more were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

The most famous victims of this period (in addition to the Chekists themselves, among whom were the most brutal purges) were military leaders Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Iona Yakir, Vasily Blucher, Pavel Dybenko, physicist, economist Nikolai Kondratiev, poets Sergei Klychkov, Osip Mandelstam, Pavel Vasiliev, Vladimir Narbut, director Vsevolod Meyerhold and many, many others. Miraculously survived those who in the future will become the pride of the nation: Sergei Korolev, Lev Gumilyov, Nikolay Zabolotsky... The absolute uselessness of these victims and the inadequacy of the initiators of terror today do not raise any doubts. A normal person simply would not and would not be able to organize such a thing: this is where the “ideal performer” Yezhov came in handy.

In the USSR, a real personality cult of Yezhov was organized. School essays and ceremonial portraits were written about him, labor exploits and solemn feasts were dedicated to him. Kazakh poet Jambul wrote:

... The snake enemy breed is revealed
Through the eyes of Yezhov - through the eyes of the people.
Yezhov lay in wait for all poisonous snakes
And smoked reptiles out of holes and lairs.
Defeated the whole scorpion breed
By the hands of Yezhov - by the hands of the people.
And Lenin's order, burning with fire,
Was given to you, Stalin's faithful people's commissar.
You are a sword, drawn calmly and menacingly,
The fire that scorched the nests of snakes
You are the bullet for all the scorpions and snakes
You are the eye of the country, which is clearer than a diamond ...

In April 1938, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov received the post of People's Commissar of Water Transport "as a load", which, as in the case of the "People's Commissar for Communications" Yagoda, was a signal of imminent disgrace.

Scapegoat

What happened, why did Stalin lose faith in "an eye clearer than a diamond"? In 1941, a year after the execution of the "iron commissar", the "father of peoples" would say:

"Yezhov is a scoundrel! Decayed man. You call him at the People's Commissariat - they say: he left for the Central Committee. You call the Central Committee - they say: he left for work. You send it to his house - it turns out that he is lying on the bed dead drunk. Killed many innocents. We shot him for it."

Of course, Stalin was cunning, and 850 hours of his meetings with Yezhov in a year and a half are true evidence of this. Stalin had no sudden disappointment in Yezhov. Nikolai Ivanovich was initially chosen as a disposable tool for the dirtiest work, for which other figures of that time were of little use.

Overwhelmed by complexes, envious of all men of normal growth, Yezhov became exactly the person Stalin needed to first carry out repressions, and then shift all responsibility for them. It seems that already at the time of Yezhov’s appointment, Stalin knew that after the “acute phase” of repressions, he would be replaced by Lavrenty Beria who will work with a subdued, submissive contingent.

In November 1938, Nikolai Yezhov, who was still at large and even headed two people's commissariats, wrote a denunciation of himself to the Politburo, where he admitted responsibility for wrecking activities in the NKVD and the prosecutor's office, and his inability to interfere. Two days later, this kind of resignation was accepted: just as Yezhov sat Yagoda in jail, so Beria organized an attack on Yezhov himself. Yezhov remained the People's Commissar for Water Transport, but everything was already clear: on April 10, he was arrested in his office George Malenkov- by an interesting coincidence, the most good-natured, liberal member of the Stalinist guard.

In the Soviet press, revelations of "excesses" appeared - Yezhov was declared a member of the Trotskyist group that destroyed the old Bolsheviks and prepared terrorist acts.

As expected at that time, sexual motives were added to the accusations of sabotage and espionage: a rubber phallus and pornographic cards were found on Yagoda, and Yezhov, as they say now, came out: he admitted his unconventional orientation.

And their last words at the trial were somewhat similar. When the prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky asked: "What are you sorry about, spy and criminal Yagoda?" And Yezhov bitterly stated: "I cleaned 14,000 Chekists, but my great fault lies in the fact that I cleaned them a little."