Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Николай Иванович Ежов) (May 1, 1895 - 1940) was a head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD (1936 - 1938), during the Great Purge (sometimes known as the "Yezhovschina" after him).

Yezhov was born in St. Petersburg and joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917 in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. He fought in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was known as a determined loyalist of Joseph Stalin, and in 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism; this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges. He became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26, 1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda. 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" (economic sabotage).

Stalin demoted Yezhov to the post of People's Commissar of Water Transport on August 21, 1938; less than a year later, Yezhov was arrested and put on trial for excesses committed during the Purges. In his defense, Yezhov said that he regretted only that he had not punished enough counter-revolutionaries. He was found guilty, and probably executed in secret in 1940.