how did nikolai yezhov die
on charges of counterrevolutionary and other crimes against the state; almost 700,000 of them were shot. Geoffrey Hosking. What the propaganda failed to mention, of course, was the nature of Comrade Yezhovs hard work. He commanded a vast network of state terror through the Soviet interior ministry, the NKVD, and had the ear of Joseph Stalin himself. As with the Show Trials, Yezhov personally played a leading role in these operations, working closely with Stalin to rid him of anyone who might even think of opposing his regime. But Eugene talked the husband, and he, despite all the betrayal, he loved his wife and couldnt do the will of the leader. Though still surrounded by his former colleagues and friends, all refused to talk to him. She was born in Gomel to a large Jewish family. He did this by helping Stalin eliminate any and all political opposition amongst the Soviet elite, both real and imagined, under the guise of state security and a war against internal enemies. You send a messenger to his apartment and there hes dead drunk. Moscow: Rosspen, 2008. Part 1: Stalin's Favourite, Resistance to the Soviet Regime in Estonia 1940-1991, Chains of Freedom: the Legacy of the Baltic Way in Hong Kong, The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. Sweaty, smiling Pauker had less than eight months left to live. File:Nikolai Yezhov with Stalin and Molotov along the Volga-Don Canal Yezhov oversaw falsified accusations in the Kirov murder case against opposition leaders Kamenev, Zinoviev and their supporters. In 1927, he was transferred to the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Party where he worked as an instructor and acting head of the department. Bukharin, who would soon fall victim to the devices of Stalin and Yezhov, could not have grasped just how wrong he was. Stalin ensured Yezhovs dedication was rewarded with various retreats and vacations when his health demanded it. He personally supervised the High Command executions. Nikolai Yezhov: A Portrait of the "Bloody Dwarf". Part 2: Terror and Just hours after Kirovs murder, Yezhov was supervising the NKVD in arresting lists of suspects drawn up by Stalin. Jesse Seeberg-Gordon, Intern at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, 08. This was often done with remarkable casualness. The main NKVD execution chamber in the basement of the Lubyanka was deliberately avoided to ensure total secrecy. All in all, during fifteen months (August 1937November 1938) more than 1.5 million people were arrested The Russian word for the Great Terror of 1936-1938, Yezhovshchina, is his namesake and legacy. For roughly two years, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. Yegor Kuz'mich Ligachev (born 1920) was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union beginnin, Plenum During the purges, Yezhov kept Lyushkov safe and therefore rightly suspected that the blame for the latters defection would fall on his head. But it was obvious he was not being straight, he hadnt laid down his arms. Nikolai Bukharin, an Old Bolshevik who would later fall victim to Stalins machinations, described him as having a good heart and clean conscience. Evgeniya Solomonovna took a lethal dose of pills and two days later died. YEZHOV, NIKOLAI (1895-1940) Soviet politician. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2020, where his honours thesis, which dealt with an Australian-Soviet diplomatic incident in the 1970s, won the Brian Fitzpatrick Prize for Best Honours Thesis in Australian History. . Some of them Yezhov had a close friendship is Ivan Dementiev, who worked the protection of the Leningrad factory the beacon, and Vladimir Konstantinov, head of the px of the Leningrad military district. In September 1936, Yezhov finally succeeded him as the Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs, a move which some, including Bukharin, believed could signal an end to the Terror. His wife, Antonina Titova, serious and purposeful girl, was two years younger. He was a key perpetrator and the namesake of the Yezhovshchina, the Great Terror of 1936-1938, earning him the nickname The Bloody Dwarf in reference to his small stature. Stalins Fosterling - Nikolai Ezhov. Apart from these political crimes, he was also accused of and confessed to a humiliating history of sexual promiscuity, including homosexuality, that was (unusually, in contrast with other condemned Bolshevik officials) later corroborated by witness reports and deemed true in some post-Soviet examinations of the case,[25][26] though the most recent biography on Yezhov dismisses allegations of homosexuality and regards them as "based on the fantasies of the investigators. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, mostly as a secretary of various regional committees of the Communist Party. Yagoda kept souvenirs in the form of the bullets that killed Zinoviev and Kamenev, which were extracted from their heads. 3-. In a twist of fate, it was Yezhov who eventually fell in the struggle for power, and Beria who became the new NKVD chief.[19]. He raised Natasha lovingly, teaching her to ride a bicycle and pampering her as any normal father does. What happened to Nikolai Yezhov? - Sage-Answer From 1929 to 1930, he was the Deputy People's Commissar for Agriculture. In September 1936 Stalin made him people's commissar of internal affairs, or state security chief. And the people repeat, gathering around: He initially cooperated with Genrikh Yagoda, who was still nominally head of the NKVD, to prosecute the Old Bolsheviks Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev and their associates on fabricated charges of a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite plot to kill Stalin. Jesse Seeberg-Gordon is an Australian historian whose primary interest is the Soviet Union and its successor states. Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was of those about whom they say meter with a cap: the growth, he was a meter 51 centimeters. The case culminated in the first of three Moscow Show Trials in August 1936. Though he retained his other posts, his role as grand inquisitor and extractor of confessions gradually diminished as Stalin retreated from the worst excesses of the Great Purge. These numbers eventually swelled to 386,798 executions and 767,397 arrests under this order alone. By saddling him with the extra job, Stalin killed two birds with one stone: Yezhov could correct the water transportation situation with tough Chekist methods, and his transfer to the terra incognita of economic tasks would leave him less time for the NKVD and weaken his position there, thus creating the possibility that in due course he could be removed from the leadership of the punitive apparatus and replaced by fresh people. Author Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband Osip died in the gulag, met Yezhov once and was surprised to find him "a modest and rather agreeable person". Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Jesse Seeberg-Gordon is an Australian historian whose primary interest is the Soviet Union and its successor states. [28], Among the many people dragged down in Yezhov's fall was Isaak Babel: "In May 1939 Yezhov confessed that Babel had committed espionage together with [Yezhov's wife] Yevgenia. How did nikolai yezhov die? This second installment addresses the mass arrests and executions overseen by Yezhov during the height of the Yezhovshchina, as well as his ultimate downfall. In a similar incident, Yezhov sought to hide the defection of an NKVD agent in Spain, Alexander Orlov, from Stalin for fear he would be implicated. Yezhovs NKVD thoroughly embodied this randomness. N. I. Yezhov at different times in the ugly drunk molested, trying to persuade him to cohabit, to all women that his apartment staff. London: Fontana Press, 1992. According to the retouched photo, Yezhov never existed. Later began to consider that gnome is a signal, they say its time. This work was originally published anonymously or under a pseudonym: He joined the Bolsheviks on 5 May 1917, in Vitebsk, six months before the October Revolution. Nikolai Yezhov Biography - NKVD director under Joseph Stalin His unwavering loyalty aside, Yezhov had been busy collecting dirt on the heads of the NKVD, party bosses, and even on Stalin himself. After the trial, Yezhov was allowed to return to his cell; but, half an hour later, he was called back and told that he had been condemned to death. He currently works as an intern with the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. When a young, but promising all-powerful head of the Central Committee of Ogrespeedtree nick Yezhov met her in Sochi, she never hesitated. Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko Though personally responsible for heinous mass killing, history typically gives little sense of who this man was, and how his intricacies, flaws, and clinical instability, fuelled his reign of terror. His last working day was April 9, at which time the "Peoples Commissariat was simply abolished by splitting it into two, the Peoples Commissariats of the River Fleet and the Sea Fleet, with two new Peoples Commissars, Z. While Soviet state records say his place of birth to be St. Petersburg, other sources claim he was born in Lithuania. Later, when he moved to Moscow and will drop in on the evening to his boss, Ivan Moskvin and his wife Sophia Alexandrovna will enclose Yezhov best pieces, calling him a Sparrow: Youre so small, you need more to eat. Whether for it, or the inevitability, but when she was arrested together with her husband, tells Yezhov to record in the minutes that the Countess was trying to poison him. He was frequently sent on leave to alleviate these ailments, including to luxurious retreats in Austria and other such counter-revolutionary countries outside of the USSR. He was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the most active period of the Great Purge. Her honesty and integrity was so impeccable that neither the repression nor the arrest and the shooting of ex-husband would not touch her. By Masha Gessen July 15, 2018 A portrait of Djakhan Abidova, a woman in the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, deliberately damaged as part of an effort to erase her in the nineteen-thirties.. As he faced the firing squad, Yakovlev addressed Yezhov: Nikolai Ivanovich! [31] Yezhov, like his predecessor Yagoda, maintained to the end his love for Stalin. "Yezhov, Nikolai (18951940) Without finishing primary school, he was apprenticed to a tailor, later becoming an industrial worker in the Russian capital, Petrograd, and a soldier after the outbreak of World War I. He admitted that innocents were being falsely accused, but dismissed their lives as unimportant so long as the purge was successful: There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents. in the Autumn of 1928 Eugene Gladun returned to Moscow and joined the editorial Board of Peasant newspaper typist. The aim of the CommunistCrimes portal is to raise international awareness about the crimes against humanity, committed by communist regimes worldwide. The Soviet armed forces soon suffered a similar fate. They were, nonetheless, executed after the inevitable guilty verdict was returned. New York: Random House, 1953. Putin, Prigozhin, and Russia's Long, Bloody History of Fallen Favorites That the order practically endorsed arbitrary arrests and murders based on personal rivalries, jealousy, or even simply bad luck, did not matter. . Nikolai Yezhov - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia Then, during the 1950s, the destalinization campaign give birth to the myth of the Yezhovshchina ("the time of Yezhov"), suggesting that Yezhov, together with a handful of others, had organized the Terror, so to speak, over the head of the party. In November 1937, Yezhov was to kill a former friend, A. I. Yakovlev. [34][35], Yezhov's body was immediately cremated and his ashes dumped in a common grave at Moscow's Donskoi Cemetery. Yezhovs rule is remembered as an era of arbitrary arrest, fear, and mass murder. Stalin, as he often did with his favourites, gave Yezhov a nickname: yezhevichka, or my little blackberry. In September 1936, Ezhov was appointed peoples Commissar of internal Affairs of the USSR. Jansen, Marc, and Nikita Petrov. One after the other, the people around him were arrested. Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Despite his significance in understanding the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union, history typically gives little sense of Yezhovs personality and how it fuelled the misery he unleashed on the Soviet populace. On 2 February 1940, in a Stalinist procedure of summary justice, he was sentenced to death, to be shot the following night. The only case when Yezhov exploded, and a scandal was the story with Sholokhov. "The Objectives of the Great Terror, 19371938." You call the ministry, hes left for the Central Committee, Stalin grumbled. Todor Zhivkov (born 1911) was the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the head of the Bulgarian government for 35 years, from 1954 to 1989. This order stipulated the executions of 72,950 enemies, and the arrest and deportation of a further 259,450, with the families of the accused also being deported. We cooperate with independent historians and researchers. His suspicions were not unfounded as on 22 August 1938, Lavrenty Beria was named his deputy, a colleague he had once tried to arrest but failed. In his final months, Yezhov continued in his water transport role, and still attended Politburo sessions. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. new water to cover up the space where Yezhov would have been. Stalins Fosterling - Nikolai Ezhov. Pauker fell to his knees and, hugging the feet of his executioners, wailed: Please For Gods sake, comrade Call Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin]! A roar of laughter exploded in the room like a shell. Although some authors portrayed him as intellectually dim, the Putilov workers remembered his penchant for constant reading, christening him Kolka-Knizhnik (Nikolai the Bookman). Yezhovs only problem was, he noted, that he does not know when to stop. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917, in Vitebsk, six months before the October Revolution. Marcus Cloud - Biography 19/03/20 Nikolai Yezhov: what happened to the wife "bloody dwarf" "I Consider it necessary to bring to the attention of the investigating authorities, a number of facts about my moral and domestic expansion. Was this an omen? In this, it functioned as a sort of abattoir, designed to expedite systematic human slaughter. By the beginning of World War II, his status within the Soviet Union had become that of enemy of the people.[4]. Nikolai Yezhov: A Portrait of the Bloody Dwarf. He also said that he would die with the name of Stalin on his lips. Accustomed to solid drinking, under these circumstances Yezhov became a real alcoholic. Yezhovs NKVD devastated the Red Army, executing three out of five marshals, fifteen of sixteen commanders, sixty out of sixty-seven corps commanders, and all seventeen of the commissars. Basingstoke, U.K., 1995. It became clear that, indeed, Yezhov should be held responsible for the Terror, but also that he acted in full accordance with the instructions of Stalin, who dismissed him when he did not need him anymore. Nikolai Yezhov: A Portrait of the "Bloody Dwarf". Part 1: Stalin's All six were shot. The culmination of the Great Terror was the so-called mass operations, aimed at eliminating people thought insufficiently loyal and supposed spies. Nikolai Yezhov Head of NKVD (Source: Public Domain) After killing Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was placed in charge of the killings as well as the head of the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) from 1936 to 1939. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. Room writer auditioned, and when Eugene came to visit, all their words and actions were recorded and logged. 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. . Stalin laughed, too. Stalin had become suspicious of his powerful and ardent state security chief, questioning his loyalty. : In typical Soviet bureaucratic fashion, such deaths were listed as heart attacks. On top of this, he had a troubling sense of humour. Some was what is called a random connection Director Mat Jacob boyars and the chief state arbiter of the USSR Philip Goloshchekin.All were arrested. 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. He was put on trial, found guilty and executed on 4th February, 1940. . On hearing the verdict, Yezhov became faint and began to collapse, but the guards caught him and removed him from the room. Nikolai Yezhov was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police force, from 1936 to 1938. During the Russian Civil War, 19191921, he fought in the Red Army. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. He is most famous for the Great Purge of 1937-1938 . Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. You call the Central Committee, hes left for the ministry. Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (1895-1940) was, in his prime, the head of the infamous Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and a confidant of Stalin himself. The latter, it seemed, no longer had much use for Yezhov. Yagoda was rapidly falling out of favour with Stalin who, at one point, threatened to punch him in the nose if he did not rectify his alleged professional inadequacies. Yet, the Bloody Dwarf, as Yezhov was known by some by reason of his short stature, eventually succumbed to the very blades of terror he himself had sharpened, as did many Bolshevik loyalists before him. There she met with Yezhov. The Terror touched all social and professional spheres, and was acutely random. The future chief of the NKVD completed only a few years at primary school before he began working at the Putilov Works in Saint Petersburg. He frequently supervised and participated in interrogations and executions himself. In this task, the NKVD, with his Blackberry at the helm, would be his personal instrument of destruction. A plenum, or plenary session, is a meeting of any organization, group, association, etc., which all members are expected to attend. Beria, who succeeded Yezhov, began a swift purge of the Yezhovites in the NKVD. There will be some innocent victims in this fight against Fascist agents, Yezhov once told a group of Chekists. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2020, where his honours thesis, which dealt with an Australian-Soviet diplomatic incident in the 1970s, won the Brian Fitzpatrick Prize for Best Honours Thesis in Australian History. Labouchere vs Reverse Labouchere Whats the Difference? However, the date of retrieval is often important. Soon the clever brisk Genia changed the mechanic to the Director of the publishing house Economic life Alexey Gladun. However, Georgian NKVD chief Sergei Goglidze warned Beria, who immediately flew to Moscow to see Stalin personally. File:Nikolai Yezhov conferring with Stalin.jpg, File:Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin, with Nikolai Yezhov.jpg, https://books.google.ca/books?id=OjCF88H-yS4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=Bloody%20Dwarf&f=false, https://books.google.am/books?id=7gAfAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions, "Stalinism, Bolsheviks, and the Revolution's Fatal Statistics", http://www.haciendapublishing.com/articles/stalin-communists-and-fatal-statistics, "Book Review of Beria Stalin's First Lieutenant by Amy Knight. Praise from Stalin and other party leaders indicates that Yezhov did not act of his own accord. As reward, he was appointed secretary of the Central Committee in 1935 thus giving him the power to supervise NKVD (English translation Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs), the Soviets state security apparatus. With drunken eyes bowed to oral communication an old friend, raped his wife. Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov, Yezhov also spelled Ezhov, byname The Dwarf, Russian Karlik, (born 1895, St. Petersburg, Russiadied early February 1940), Russian Communist Party official who, while chief of the Soviet security police (NKVD) from 1936 to 1938, administered the most severe stage of the great purges, known as Yezhovshchina (or Ezhovshch. We cooperate with independent historians and researchers. Yezhov also had a voracious sexual appetite. Under his leadership, the NKVD had murdered almost 700,000 people, and sent a further 600,000 to prisons and forced labour camps. Jesse Seeberg-Gordon, Intern at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, 10. Part 2: Terror and Downfall, Resistance to the Soviet Regime in Estonia 1940-1991, Chains of Freedom: the Legacy of the Baltic Way in Hong Kong, The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. Over the following months, Beria (with Stalin's approval) began increasingly to usurp Yezhov's governance of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Within a week the writer was arrested; during interrogation he in his turn testified against the Yezhovs. Wladislaw Gomulka (1905-1982) ruled Poland for 14 years as first secretary of the Communist party. ." On top of being an alcoholic, Yezhov suffered from chronic health issues, including myasthenia, anaemia, psoriasis, and what was then known as neurasthenia. New York: Vintage, 2007. Hes seriously ill and I cannot estimate the gravity of the situation. Held by two husky NKVD goons, a drunken Pauker took to imitating Zinovievs final minutes, when he was being dragged from his cell to his execution. We are launching a major attack on the Enemy [] Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. - , , , , I can see it in your eyes that you feel pity for me. 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. The sentiment that the Terror had effectively eliminated the Partys internal enemies, despite the excesses of Yezhov, became the accepted, retrospective outlook on the chaos of Yezhovs reign. This working relationship between Yezhov and Yagoda was not to last. Nikolai Yezhov | Hitler Parody Wiki | Fandom Yezhovs forewarning of his associate Genrikh Lyushkov, the NKVD commander of the Soviet Far East, that he was being recalled to Moscow, accelerated his ruin when Lyushkov defected to the Japanese in June 1938. The latter commanded, and the former executed. "[24], Yezhov confessed to the standard litany of state crimes necessary to mark him as an "enemy of the people" prior to execution, including "wrecking", official incompetence, theft of government funds, and treasonous collaboration with German spies and saboteurs, none of which were likely or supported by evidence. New York: Vintage, 2007. In the mid-1930s, he oversaw the workings of the NKVD. In the first two decades of Putin's reign, Prigozhin won the czar's favor by acting as a culinary courtier, then made his fortune when Putin gave him contracts to supply victuals to the army . Yezhov, Nikolai (1895-1940) | Encyclopedia.com Nikolai Yezhov was born on May 1 1895 in the Russian Empire either in St Petersburg, Russia ,or probably Veiveriai, Marijampol ,or Kaunas in Lithuania in Imperial Russia . This proved a turning point in Yezhovs career as he was given the responsibility by Stalin to implicate opposition leaders, Zinoviev and Kamanev and their supporters. [5] He completed only his elementary education. A couple of years after, he changed his profession to become a factory worker. In traditional Stalinist fashion, once Stalin decided he wanted one of his bureaucrats to die for whatever reason, they either got a show-trial and became a pariah (if they had propaganda value and were willing to confess .
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how did nikolai yezhov die
