[76], The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. Nikolai Knyzhov Stats, Height, Weight, Position, Salary, Title | Hockey Nikolai Yezhov was born on May 1 1895 in the Russian Empire either in St Petersburg,Russia,or probably Veiveriai,Marijampol . However the actual evidence introduced at trial was obtained from forced confessions. Retouchers removed him from the photo, necessitating the re-creation of Kodzhayev's suit. Thirty percent of officers purged in 19371939 were allowed to return to service. 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). ", "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. [12] Many of those arrested after Kirov's assassination also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself, including high-ranking party officials. All possessions were confiscated. Yezhov even blamed Yagoda for an attempt to assassinate him by sprinkling mercury around his office. 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. [14][15], A turning point for Yezhov came with Stalin's response to the 1934 murder of the Bolshevik chief of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov. [33][34], On 2 February 1940, Yezhov was tried by the Military Collegium, chaired by Soviet judge Vasiliy Ulrikh, behind closed doors. He died in February 1940. She was photographed before her execution, as was normal for condemned prisoners. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. Yefim Yevdokimov - Wikipedia But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot. "[129], Evidence and the results of research began to appear after Stalin's death. '", Robert C. Tucker, "Stalin in Power", p. 445, The Independent, "The History of Hell", 8 January 1995, Roy Medvedev, "Let history judge", p. 438, Allen S. Whiting and General Sheng Shicai. In these roles he perpetrated the grand excesses known as the Yezhovshchina, the cruel, ruthless elimination or repression of Stalins enemies or alleged enemies in the Great Purge (see purge trials). 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. 14 Yezhov's height. The book Rehabilitation: The Political Processes of the 1930s50s (. Subsequently, she was known by the name Natalia Khayutina. "[136] According to historian Corrina Kuhr, 700,000 people were executed during the Great Purge out of the 2.5 million who were arrested. Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, applauded him as "an unyielding Bolshevik who without getting up from his desk, night and day, is unravelling and cutting the threads of the Fascist conspiracy". Tabidze's lifelong friend and fellow poet. 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. Yezhov - Yale University Press Sigachev, I. Shevchuk, V. Khlopov under editorship of acad. [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. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He was careful not to sign anything on this matter and was equally insistent on no documentation. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin's purges. Most Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, believed that the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 had failed because their leaders hadn't adequately anticipated the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary reaction from the establishment. [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! In addition to ordinary citizens prominent members of the Communist Party were also targets for the purges. [59], The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as the Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Updated: April 11, 2022 | Original: April 20, 2018. Updates? 00447 was issued, directed against "ex-kulaks" and other "anti-Soviet elements" (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime, former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.). [2] Contents 1 Early life 2 Bolshevik 3 NKVD 4 Denunciation [157] His findings, while not exonerating Stalin or the Soviet state, dispel the notion that the bloodletting was merely the result of Stalin attempting to establish his own personal dictatorship; evidence suggests he was committed to building the socialist state envisioned by Lenin. Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. They were turned away by embassy officials, only to be arrested on the pavement outside by lurking NKVD agents. [12] Yezhov and Feigenburg had an adopted daughter, Natalia, an orphan from a children's home. But from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. After February 1922, he worked in the political system, mostly as a secretary of various regional committees of the Communist Party. 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. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and Stalin in particular, were the sole dispensers of ideology. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: , IPA: [nkaj vanvt (j)of]; 1 May 1895 - 4 February 1940) 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. 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. That's too many. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the U.S.S.R and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges. [20] As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing."[21]. Yezhov also conducted a thorough purge of the security organs, both NKVD and GRU, removing and executing not only many officials who had been appointed by his predecessors Yagoda and Menzhinsky, but even his own appointees as well. For a while Yezhov worked at Stalins right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. The NKVD officers shot prisoners in the head using pistols.[72][96]. Beria had managed to survive the Great Purge and the "Yezhovshchina" during the years 19361938, even though he had almost become one of its victims. At some point, it was discovered by the NKVD that a conspiratorial Opposition Bloc had been formed in 1932, by Leon Trotsky and various other soviet politicians like Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Nikolai Yezhov - Metapedia Yezhov was born either in Saint Petersburg, according to his official Soviet biography, or in southwest Lithuania (probably Veiveriai, Marijampol or Kaunas). In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by the interrogators. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. Leon Trotsky, considered a major player in the Russian Revolution and a major contributor to Marxist theory, was never rehabilitated by the USSR. [72], Common criminals such as thieves, "violators of the passport regime", etc. 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. [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. Also known as: Karlik, Nikolay Ivanovich Ezhov, The Dwarf. 00447 also targeted "the most vicious and stubborn anti-Soviet elements in camps", they were all "to be put into the first category"that is, shot.