After leaving school he worked as a tailor's assistant. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences. When he saw him again in 1927, "his appearance had changed considerably: he had grown fatter and looked much older and very dignified and important. Yagoda had been cultivating Gorky as a potentially useful contact since 1928 and employed Gorky's secretary, Pyotr Kryuchkov, as a spy. No one. Credits. Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that while the 'purposive deaths' caused by Hitler constitute 'murder', those caused under Stalin fall into the category of 'execution', although in terms of "causing death by criminal neglect and ruthlessness () Stalin probably exceeded Hitler". NKVD Order no. [143] Stalin may have failed to anticipate the catastrophic excesses of the NKVD under Yezhov. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000250,000 people of Polish background depending on the size of their families. "[31] A letter from Beria, Andreyev and Malenkov to Stalin, dated 29 January 1939, accused the NKVD of allowing "massive, unfounded arrests of completely innocent persons", and stated that the leadership of Yezhov "did not put a stop to this kind of arbitrariness and extremismbut sometimes itself abetted it. 19360927-newspaper-Perekovka-reforging.jpg 701 724; 218 KB. Khrushchev later claimed in his memoirs that he had initiated the process, overcoming objections and protests from the rest of Party leadership, but the transcripts belie this, although they show differences of opinion regarding the contents. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. One was killed during the suppression of the revolt in Sormovo in 1905; the other was shot for taking part in a mutiny in a regiment during the war with Germany. After Trotsky was exiled by Stalinfor mounting a failed opposition to his leadership,the revolutionary was snipped, airbrushed and covered up in countless photographs. Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Just five foot tall with a crippled leg, Yezhov was nicknamed the "Dwarf". And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too. [19] Yagoda then worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, which resulted in prosecution and subsequent execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936, beginning the Great Purge. Nikolai Knyzhov weighs 222 lbs (100 kg). [19] According to the anti-communist soviet defector Grigori Tokaev, who was an underground participant in an oppositional group,[23] the opposition was working with parts of the police and Yagoda himself: He [Yagoda] was removed from the NKVD, and we lost a strong link in our opposition intelligence service. A number of purges were officially explained as an elimination of the possibilities of sabotage and espionage by the Polish Military Organisation and, consequently, many victims of the purge were ordinary Soviet citizens of Polish origin. ", "Howard Fast: On Leaving the Communist Party", "Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence", "Pictorial essay: Death trenches bear witness to Stalin's purges July 17, 1997", "Mass grave found at Ukrainian monastery", "Wary of its past, Russia ignores mass grave site", "Stalin-era mass grave yields tons of bones", "Jewish Cemeteries, Synagogues, and Mass Grave Sites in Ukraine", "Former Killing Ground Becomes Shrine to Stalin's Victims", "Critics Scoff as Kremlin Erects Monument to the Repressed", "Historian James Harris says Russian archives show we've misunderstood Stalin", "The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest", Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union Terror, famine and the Gulag, "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 193045", Case Study: The NKVD Mass Secret Operation n 00447 (August 1937 November 1938), "Documenting the Death Toll: Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow, 193738", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Purge&oldid=1159715151, 1937, introduction of NKVD troikas for implementation of "revolutionary justice. In another, while reviewing one of Yezhov's lists, he added to M. I. Baranov's name, "beat, beat! I felt then that it would be unlucky for me or anyone else ever to fall into his hands." In the whole of mynow, alas, already longlife, I had to meet few people who, by their nature, were as repellent as Yezhov. Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Yezhov walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal, in April, 1937. Yagoda's father, Grigori, the jeweller, who was aged 78 in 1938, wrote directly to Stalin disowning "our only surviving son" because of "his grave crimes". [12] Many of those arrested after Kirov's assassination also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself, including high-ranking party officials. [42], In Russia, Yezhov remains mostly known as the person who was responsible for atrocities of the Great Purge that he conducted on Stalin's orders. ", "Subversion in the Red Army and the Military Purge of 19371938. Orders were followed, quietly. Under Yezhov, the Great Purge reached its height during 19371938. The purges themselves were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the secret police of the USSR. Stalin criticized the NKVD for carrying out mass executions and subsequently executed Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who headed the NKVD during the purge years. Is this claim about the Jewish ethnicity of high-ranking NKVD officers true? "Who plotted against whom? How much does Nikolai Knyzhov weigh? Sometimes, Stalin inserted himself in photos at key moments in history, or had photo technicians make him look taller or more handsome. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained. Nikolai Yezhov is not the little guy on the right (who is an anonymous commissar), he is the big guy on the center (WHO IS . Updates? [citation needed], The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. Experience in carrying out the purge facilitated purging other key elements in the wider Soviet polity. There are two theories as to why Yagoda did not report on the bloc earlier. [93], The purge had a significant effect on German decision making in World War II: many German generals opposed an invasion of Russia, but Hitler disagreed, arguing that the Red Army was less effective after its intellectual leadership had been eliminated in the purge. [citation needed], On 2 July 1937, in a top secret order to regional Party and NKVD chiefs Stalin instructed them to produce the estimated number of "kulaks" and "criminals" in their districts. [109] In addition, 141 American Communists of Finnish origin were executed and buried at Sandarmokh. By 1934 several of Stalin's rivals, such as Trotsky, began calling for Stalin's removal and attempted to break his influence over the party. On hearing the verdict, Yezhov became faint and began to collapse, but the guards caught him and removed him from the room. He was promptly shot on 16 July 1937. English: Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: ; May 1, 1895 - February 4, 1940) was a senior figure in the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) during the period of the Great Purge. Nikolai Knyzhov is 6-3 (190 cm) tall. Stalin wasnt the only dictator who loved to doctor photos. The Soviet press portrayed the country as threatened from within by fascist spies. One argues that the purges reflected Stalin's ambitions, his paranoia, and his inner drive to increase his power and eliminate potential rivals. The purge hit deeply from June 1937 and November 1938, removing 35,000; many were executed. were also dealt with in a summary way. [116], The Great Purge of 19361938 can be roughly divided into four periods:[117], In the summer of 1938, Yezhov was relieved from his post as head of the NKVD and was eventually tried and executed. In addition, a much greater number of ordinary Soviet citizens were accused (usually on flimsy or nonexistent evidence) of disloyalty or "wrecking" by local Chekist troikas and similarly punished to fill Stalin and Yezhov's arbitrary quotas for arrests and executions. Nikolai Yezhov was born in 1895 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire [now Russia]. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge but fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, confessing after torture to a range of anti-Soviet activity. 1 comment. On 14 November, another of Yezhovs protgs, the Ukrainian NKVD chief Aleksandr Uspensky, disappeared after being warned by Yezhov that he was in trouble. [34], According to historian James Harris, contemporary archival research pokes "rather large holes in the traditional story" weaved by Conquest and others. In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. The NKVD attacked the supporters, friends, and family of these "heretical" Marxists, whether they lived in Russia or not. Despite the Great Purge being over, the atmosphere of mistrust and widespread surveillance continued for decades after. The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. [120], In some cases, high military command arrested under Yezhov were later executed under Beria. Yagoda also supervised construction of the White SeaBaltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the gulag system, during which 12,00025,000 laborers died. That's too many. Hagenloh, Paul. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. [citation needed], According to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", and to historian Robert Conquest, a great number of accusations, notably those presented at the Moscow show trials, were based on forced confessions, often obtained through torture,[27] and on loose interpretations of Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary crimes. [44], Due to his role in the Great Purge, Yezhov has not been officially rehabilitated by the Soviet and Russian authorities.[45][46]. The Xinjiang War (1937) broke out amid the purge. [147][148][149][150] Some, such as the Bykivnia killing fields near Kyiv, are said to contain up to 200,000 corpses. [113] Mass graves containing hundreds of executed Buddhist monks and civilians have been discovered as recently as 2003. In early 1937, poet Pavel Nikolayevich Vasiliev is said to have defended Nikolai Bukharin as "a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia" at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial (Second Moscow Trial) and damned other writers then signing the routine condemnations as "pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature". "[71], The Orthodox clergy, including active parishioners, was nearly annihilated: 85% of the 35,000 members of the clergy were arrested. All Rights Reserved. He joined the Bolsheviks on 5 May 1917, in Vitebsk, six months before the October Revolution. Yagoda was demoted to the post of People's Commissar for Post and Telegraph. [151][152][153][bettersourceneeded], In 2007, one such site, the Butovo firing range near Moscow, was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism. Meanwhile, on September 26, 1936, he had succeeded Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda as chief of the NKVD, and in January 1937 he had acquired the newly created title of general commissar of state security. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he . A series of documents discovered in the Central Committee archives in 1992 by Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrate that there were limits for arrests and executions as for all other activities in the planned economy. A. Shashkov and S. S. [41] The execution remained secret and as late as 1948, Time reported "Some think he is still in an insane asylum". In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin's orders. Yagoda continued to be an effective head of the OGPU until July 1931, when the Old Bolshevik Ivan Akulov was appointed First Deputy Chairman, and Yagoda was demoted to the post of Second Deputy. [16] Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. Nikolai Yezhov is the 867th most popular politician (down from 761st in 2019), the 101st most popular biography from Russia (down from 93rd in 2019) and the 39th most popular Russian Politician. The liquidations gradually extended from the party leaders to the party and state apparatchiki and finally to the general population. Already a heavy drinker, in the last weeks of his service, he reportedly was disconsolate, slovenly, and drunk nearly all of his waking hours, rarely bothering to show up to work. This appointment did not at first seem to suggest an intensification of the purge: "Unlike Yagoda, Yezhov did not come out of the 'organs', which was considered an advantage". They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. "Stalinist Terror and Democracy: The 1937 Union Campaign". Meant to be the culmination of previous trials,[neutrality is disputed] it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International, former premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, and Genrikh Yagoda, recently disgraced head of the NKVD. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes. pp. 30-50- ) (1991) contains a large amount of newly presented original archive material: transcripts of interrogations, letters of convicts, and photos. [21][22] The term great purge itself was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalins favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. [20] As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing."[21]. [33][34], On 2 February 1940, Yezhov was tried by the Military Collegium, chaired by Soviet judge Vasiliy Ulrikh, behind closed doors. Another possible reason Stalin did not trust Yagoda was his failure to report the existence of the Bloc of Oppositions earlier. On 3 March 1939, Yezhov was relieved of all his posts in the Central Committee, but retained his post as People's Commissar of Water Transportation. Short Q from interrogation on 525-6. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Yezhov was a foremost Soviet leader during these years, second in power only to Stalin himself. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society: intelligentsia, peasantsespecially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks)and professionals. Stalins censors then removed Yezhov from the photographic record, including cutting him from a photograph in which he smiled next to his former boss, Stalin, next to a waterway. Stalins obsession with image manipulation didnt stop with photos. The hard work resulted in two massive reports, which detailed the mechanism of falsification of the show-trials against Bukharin, Zinoviev, Tukhachevsky, and many others. Inside of Joseph's Stalin's Soviet Union, the NKVD were a notorious secret police who were responsible for the executions and deaths of hundreds of thousands. [12] Yezhov and Feigenburg had an adopted daughter, Natalia, an orphan from a children's home. (Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images), Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window), Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window), Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window), Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window), Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window), Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages, https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching, How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalins Great Purge. Ezhov interrogation, Pavliukov 525-6 & n. 489 p. 564. "Block of Rights and Trotskyites. [118], Michael Parrish argues that while the Great Terror ended in 1938, a lesser terror continued in the 1940s. [77] When Yezhov was arrested in 1939, he stated during his interrogation that he had many lovers, including Filipp Goloshchyokin, then party functionary in Kazakh ASSR, during the latter half of 1925, and that they had shared an apartment in Kzyl-Orda. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 under Yezhov, nearly tripling in size in just two years, with at least 140,000 of these prisoners (and likely many more) dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and the elements in the camps (or during transport to them). By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the Rightists, led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. [66], Anastas Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known[neutrality is disputed] that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Died February 1940. [74] The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. [citation needed], Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[132][133] in addition to 116,000 deaths in the Gulag,[3] and 2,000 unofficially killed in non-article 58 shootings;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million, which includes executions, deaths in detention and those who died shortly after being released from the Gulag, as a result of their treatment therein. [163], This article is about the 19361938 Soviet purge. Such was the atmosphere of fear that families of those arrested and condemned were compelled to destroy even the image of their loved ones in their own personal records,writes biographer Helen Rappaport. [39][40], Yezhov's body was immediately cremated and his ashes dumped in a common grave at Moscow's Donskoye Cemetery. In the late 1980s, with the formation of the Memorial Society and similar organisations across the Soviet Union at a time of Gorbachev's glasnost ("openness and transparency") it became possible not only to speak about the Great Terror but to begin locating the killing grounds of 19371938 and identifying those who lay buried there. Photograph by F. Kislov / Tate Nikolai Yezhov has been . [27] She was particularly vulnerable because of her many lovers, and for months people close to her were being arrested. For example, Georgy Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. February 26] 1876 - October 28, 1941) was a Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician, and party functionary.. A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1903 and a founding member of the Russian Communist Party . We strive for accuracy and fairness. 00486. According to Timothy Snyder, ethnic Poles constituted the largest group of victims in the Great Terror, comprising less than 0.5% of the country's population but comprising 12.5% of those executed. [79] Of the operations against national minorities, it was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims. [2], The Soviets themselves made their own estimates with Vyacheslav Molotov saying "The report written by that commission membersays that 1,370,000 arrests were made in the 1930s. [28] Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as expecting clemency from Stalin after the show trial: "Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: 'I appeal to you! By 1929, Stalin had outmaneuvered his political opponents and gained full control over the party. [35] Yezhov, like his predecessor Yagoda, maintained to the end his love for Stalin. The second commission largely worked from 1961 to 1963 and was headed by Shvernik ("Shvernik Commission"). The report enraged Stalin, interpreting it as Yagoda's advice to stop the show trials and in particular to abandon the planned purge of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union and the former commander in chief of the Red Army. The main NKVD execution chamber in the basement of the Lubyanka was deliberately avoided to ensure total secrecy. 5 2 (1.57 m) Born. Height. Yagoda was the only defendant not to be posthumously rehabilitated. Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, participants in the repression as members of the Politburo, maintained this justification throughout the purge; they each signed many death lists. [30], From 1930 onwards, the Party and police officials feared the "social disorder" caused by the upheavals of forced collectivization of peasants and the resulting famine of 19321933, as well as the massive and uncontrolled migration of millions of peasants into cities. He also said that he would die with the name of Stalin on his lips. [16], He became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Central Committee on 26 September 1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms. [92] The claim is unsupported by facts, as by the time the documents were supposedly created, two people from the eight in the Tukhachevsky group were already imprisoned, and by the time the document was said to reach Stalin the purging process was already underway. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles. Dukelskii. [original research?] Under Yezhov, the purges reached their height, with roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment being imprisoned or shot, along with hundreds of thousands of others, suspected of disloyalty or "wrecking". He called them in 1941 "the great purges", and described how over four years they affected "the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists". [citation needed] When Yezhov was executed, Stalin claimed in a private conversation with Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was because he had killed many innocent people. Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists. He took to visiting public baths with Kryuchkov. [9], Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR). Others were executed in public after show trials. His death led to an investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. Rejecting these Hitler gave Keitel his main reason 'The first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need. [54], Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 19341935 period; the GULAG system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, and penal labor became a major developmental resource in the Soviet economy. [3], According to Robert Conquest, a practice of falsification for lowering the execution numbers was disguising executions with the sentence "ten years without the right of correspondence" which almost always meant execution. [3], There is another version of his early career, told in the memoirs of the former NKVD officer Aleksandr M. Orlov, who alleged that Yagoda invented his early revolutionary career and did not join the Bolsheviks until 1917, and that his deputy Mikhail Trilisser was dismissed from service for trying to expose the lie. Updated: April 11, 2022 | Original: April 20, 2018. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.[56]. Robert Conquest emphasized Stalin's paranoia, focused on the Moscow show trial of "Old Bolsheviks", and analyzed the carefully planned and systematic destruction of the Communist Party. He died in February 1940. Skorkin): This page was last edited on 26 June 2023, at 16:20. Watching him, I am frequently reminded of those evil boys from Rasteryayeva Street workshops, whose favorite form of entertainment was to light a piece of paper tied to the tail of a cat drenched with kerosene, and relish in watching the cat scamper down the street in maddening horror, unable to rid itself of the flames that are getting closer and closer.
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