As we know from history, most of those who sent the nobles and members of the royal family in France to the guillotine during the Great Terror in the 18th century, were subsequently executed themselves. There was even a catchphrase voiced by the Minister of Justice Danton, which he said before he was beheaded: "The revolution devours its children."
History repeated itself during the years of Stalin's terror, when with a stroke of a pen, yesterday's executioner could end up on the same prison bunk or be shot without trial, like those whom he himself sent to death.
A striking example of the above is Nikolai Yezhov - Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR. The reliability of many pages of his biography is questioned by historians, because there are many dark spots in it.
Parents
According to the official version, Yezhov Nikolai was born in 1895 in St. Petersburg, in a working-class family.
At the same time, there is an opinion that the father of the people's commissar was Ivan Yezhov, who was born with. Volkhonshchino (Tula province) and served military service in Lithuania. He is theremet a local girl, whom he soon married, deciding not to return to his homeland. After demobilization, the Yezhov family moved to the Suwalki province, and Ivan got a job in the police.
Childhood
At the time of Kolya's birth, his parents, most likely, lived in one of the villages of the Mariampolsky district (now the territory of Lithuania). After 3 years, the boy's father was appointed zemstvo guard of the county town area. This circumstance caused the family to move to Mariampol, where Kolya studied for 3 years at an elementary school.
Considering their son to be sufficiently educated, in 1906 his parents sent him to a relative in St. Petersburg, where he was supposed to master tailoring.
Youth
Although the biography of Nikolai Yezhov states that until 1911 he worked at the Putilov factory as an apprentice locksmith. However, archival documents do not confirm this. It is only known for certain that in 1913 the young man returned to his parents in the Suwalki province, and then wandered in search of work. At the same time, he even lived in Tilsit (Germany) for some time.
In the summer of 1915 Nikolai Yezhov volunteered for the army. After training in the 76th Infantry Battalion, he was sent to the North-Western Front.
Two months later, after suffering a serious illness and a slight wound, he was sent to the rear, and in the early summer of 1916, Nikolai Yezhov, whose height was only 1 m 51 cm, was declared unfit for military service. For this reason, he was sent to the rear workshop in Vitebsk, wherewent to guards and outfits, and soon, as the most competent of the soldiers, he was appointed clerk.
In the autumn of 1917, Yezhov Nikolai was hospitalized, and returning to his unit only at the beginning of 1918, he was dismissed due to illness for 6 months. He again went to his parents, who at that time lived in the Tver province. From August of the same year, Yezhov began working at a glass factory located in Vyshny Volochek.
The beginning of a party career
In a questionnaire filled out by Yezhov himself in the early 1920s, he indicated that he joined the RSDLP in May 1917. However, after a while, he began to claim that he had done it back in March 1917. At the same time, according to some members of the Vitebsk city organization of the RSDLP, Yezhov joined its ranks only on August 3.
In April 1919, he was called up for service in the Red Army and sent to the radio base in Saratov. There he first served as a private, and then as a scribe under command. In October of the same year, Nikolai Yezhov took the post of commissar of the base where radio specialists were trained, and in the spring of 1921 he was appointed commissar of the base and elected deputy head of the propaganda department of the Tatar Regional Committee of the RCP.
At party work in the capital
In July 1921, Yezhov Nikolai registered a marriage with A. Titova. Shortly after the wedding, the newlywed went to Moscow and secured the transfer of her husband there as well.
In the capital, Yezhov began to quickly advance his career. In particular, a few months later he was sent to the Mari regional party committee as an executive secretary.
Next heheld the following party positions:
- Executive Secretary of the Semipalatinsk Provincial Committee;
- head of the organizational department of the Kyrgyz regional committee;
- Deputy Executive Secretary of the Kazak Regional Committee;
- instructor of the organizational distribution department of the Central Committee.
According to the leadership, Yezhov Nikolai Ivanovich was an ideal performer, but had a significant drawback - he could not stop, even in situations where nothing could be done.
Having worked in the Central Committee until 1929, he served as Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture of the USSR for 12 months, and then returned to the organizational and distribution department as head.
Purges
Organization department Nikolai Yezhov was in charge until 1934. Then he was included in the Central Commission of the CPSU, which was supposed to carry out a "purge" of the party, and from February 1935 he was elected chairman of the CPC and secretary of the Central Committee.
From 1934 to 1935, Yezhov, on behalf of Stalin, headed the commission on the Kremlin case and the investigation into the murder of Kirov. It was he who linked them to the activities of Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev, in fact conspiring with Agranov against the chief of the last People's Commissar of the NKVD, Yagoda.
New appointment
In September 1936, I. Stalin and A. Zhdanov, who were on vacation at that time, sent a cipher telegram to the capital addressed to Molotov, Kaganovich and other members of the Politburo of the Central Committee. In it, they demanded that Yezhov be appointed to the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, leaving him Agranov as his deputy.
Of course, the order was carried outimmediately, and already in early October 1936, Nikolai Yezhov signed the first order in his department on taking office.
Ezhov Nikolai - People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
Like G. Yagoda, he was subordinate to the state security agencies and the police, as well as auxiliary services, for example, the fire department and highways.
In his new post, Nikolai Yezhov organized repressions against people who were suspected of espionage or anti-Soviet activities, "purges" in the party, mass arrests, deportations on social, national and organizational grounds.
In particular, after in March 1937 the plenum of the Central Committee instructed him to restore order in the NKVD, 2,273 employees of this department were arrested. In addition, it was under Yezhov that orders began to be sent to the local NKVD bodies indicating the number of unreliable citizens subject to arrest, execution, deportation or imprisonment in prisons and camps.
For these "feats" Yezhov was awarded the Order of Lenin. Also among his merits can be attributed the destruction of the old guard of revolutionaries, who knew the unsightly details of the biographies of many top officials of the state.
On April 8, 1938, Yezhov was appointed part-time people's commissar of water transport, and a few months later Lavrenty Beria took the posts of first deputy for the NKVD and head of the Main Directorate of State Security.
Opala
In November 1938, the Politburo of the Communist Party discussed the denunciation of Nikolai Yezhov, whowas signed by the head of the Ivanovo department of the NKVD. A few days later, the people's commissar submitted a letter of resignation, in which he acknowledged his responsibility for the sabotage activities of the "enemies" who, due to his oversight, penetrated the prosecutor's office and the NKVD.
Foreseeing his imminent arrest, in a letter to the leader of the peoples, he asked not to touch his "seventy-year-old old mother" and ended his message with the words that he "destroyed the enemies great."
In December 1938, Izvestia and Pravda published a message that Yezhov, according to his request, was relieved of his duties as head of the NKVD, but retained the post of people's commissar of water transport. His successor was Lavrenty Beria, who began his career in a new position with the arrests of people close to Yezhov in the NKVD, the courts and the prosecutor's office.
On the day of the 15th anniversary of the death of V. I. Lenin, N. Yezhov was present for the last time at an important event of national importance - a solemn meeting dedicated to this sad anniversary. However, then an event followed that directly indicated that the clouds of anger of the leader of the peoples were gathering over him even more than before - he was not elected a delegate to the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
Arrest
In April 1939, Yezhov Nikolai Ivanovich, whose biography until that moment had been a story about the incredible career rise of a man who had barely graduated from elementary school, was taken into custody. The arrest took place in Malenkov's office, with the participation of Beria, who was appointed to lead the investigation into his case. From there he was sent toSukhanovskaya special prison of the NKVD of the USSR.
After 2 weeks, Yezhov wrote a note in which he confessed that he was a homosexual. Subsequently, it was used as evidence that he committed unnatural acts of a sexual nature for selfish and anti-Soviet purposes.
However, the main thing that was blamed on him was the preparation of a coup d'etat and terrorist personnel who were supposed to be used to assassinate members of the party and government on November 7 on Red Square, during a demonstration of workers.
Sentence and execution
Nikolai Yezhov, whose photo is presented in the article, denied all the charges and called his only mistake insufficient diligence in the "purge" of the state security agencies.
In his last speech at the trial, Yezhov said that he was beaten during the investigation, although he had been honestly fighting and destroying the enemies of the people for 25 years. In addition, he said that if he wanted to carry out a terrorist attack against one of the members of the government, he did not need to recruit anyone, he could simply use the appropriate technique.
February 3, 1940, the former People's Commissar was sentenced to death. The execution took place the next day. According to those who accompanied him in the last minutes of his life, he sang the Internationale before being shot. The death of Nikolai Yezhov came instantly. In order to destroy even the memory of a former comrade-in-arms, the party elite decided to cremate himcorpse.
After death
Nothing was reported about the trial of Yezhov and his execution. The only thing that an ordinary citizen of the Land of Soviets noticed was the return of the former name to the city of Cherkessk, as well as the disappearance of images of the former people's commissar from group photos.
In 1998, Nikolai Yezhov was declared not subject to rehabilitation by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The following facts were cited as arguments:
- Yezhov organized a series of murders of people who were personally objectionable to him;
- he took the life of his wife because she could expose his illegal activities, and did everything to pass off this crime as an act of suicide;
- As a result of operations carried out in accordance with the orders of Nikolai Yezhov, more than one and a half million citizens were repressed.
Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich: personal life
As already mentioned, the first wife of the executed People's Commissar was Antonina Titova (1897-1988). The couple divorced in 1930 and had no children.
With his second wife - Evgenia (Sulamith) Solomonovna - Yezhov met when she was still married to a diplomat and journalist Alexei Gladun. The young woman soon divorced and became the wife of a promising party functionary.
The couple failed to produce their own child, but they adopted an orphan. The girl's name was Natalya, and after the suicide of her adoptive mother, which occurred shortly before Yezhov's arrest and execution, she ended up in an orphanage.
Now you know who Nikolai Yezhov was, whose biography was quite typical for many employees of the state apparatus of those years who seized power in the early years of the formation of the USSR and ended their lives in the same way as their victims.
