As Stalins purges became more and more widespread, civilians who feared being branded as his political enemies began to realize that owning photos of Stalins political enemieseven photos in books or magazineswas dangerous. By the summer of 1938, however, Yezhov himself had become the object of Stalins suspicions. [91], The purge of the army was claimed to be supported by German-forged documents (said to have been correspondence between Marshal Tukhachevsky and members of the German high command). [24], On 22 August 1938, NKVD leader Lavrenty Beria was named as Yezhov's deputy. During this period the NKVD reopened these cases and relabeled them as "sabotage" or "wrecking. "[139] Stalin also signed 357 lists in 1937 and 1938 authorizing executions of some 40,000 people, and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot,[140] this was 7.4% of those executed legally. Forged documents and misinformation spread by Nazi Germany in order to incriminate innocent Soviet citizens also contributed to this perception. The graves are believed to date back to the late 1930s during the purge. In Moscow, the use of gas vans to kill the victims during their transportation to the Butovo firing range has been documented. Subsequently, she was known by the name Natalia Khayutina. Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Yezhov walking along the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal, in April, 1937. [12] Many of those arrested after Kirov's assassination also confessed plans to kill Stalin himself, including high-ranking party officials. It included Shelepin, Serdyuk, Mironov, Rudenko, and Semichastny. The commission based its findings in large part on eyewitness testimonies of former NKVD workers and victims of repressions, and on many documents. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin's purges. ", 1937, passage of Article 58-14 about "counter-revolutionary sabotage.". [41] Stalin believed war was imminent, threatened both by an explicitly hostile Germany and an expansionist Japan. The answers required a lot more digging, but it gradually became clearer that the violence of the late 1930s was driven by fear. From 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. Edit. The former Politburo members Yan Rudzutak and Stanislav Kosior and many lower-level victims were also declared innocent in the 1950s. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. [127] While "Communist Parties everywhere simply transmitted the Soviet line", some of the most critical reporting also came from the left, notably The Manchester Guardian. Her book, The Heroine's Bookshelf (Harper), won the Colorado Book Award for nonfiction. As the purges began, the government (through the NKVD) shot Bolshevik heroes, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Bla Kun, as well as the majority of Lenin's Politburo, for disagreements in policy. [10], Yezhov married Antonina Titova (Russian: ), a minor Communist Party clerk, in 1919,[11] but he later divorced her and married Yevgenia Feigenburg[ru] (Khayutina-Yezhova), a Soviet publishing worker and Chief Editor of USSR in Construction magazine who was known for her friendship with many Soviet writers and actors. Take the famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising their flag over the bombed-out Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin at the end of World War II. 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. One sucherasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalins purges. Joining the Communist Party in March 1917, he was a political commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War and thereafter rose through several political posts, becoming a functionary for the party Central Committee in Moscow by 1927 and one of Joseph Stalins favourites. 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. Nikolai Yezhov | Military Wiki | Fandom 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. He took to visiting public baths with Kryuchkov. Nikolai Yezhov Biography - NKVD director under Joseph Stalin Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. Nikolai Yezhov - Biography - IMDb 24 1939 . [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. We were not idiots." However, by the early 1930s, party officials began losing faith in his leadership following the human cost of the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture. [37], Although an Opposition Bloc led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, Pierre Brou asserts that Bukharin was not involved. Yezhov - Yale University Press Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk states "theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record". 2000. [63] For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned the first three into fervent anti-communists eventually. [37] Differently from Brou, one of his former allies,[61] Jules Humbert-Droz, said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership. [67], Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror. Personal details. Well acquainted with typical Stalinist bureaucratic precursors to eventual dismissal and arrest, Yezhov recognized Beria's increasing influence with Stalin as a sign that his downfall was imminent, and he plunged headlong into alcoholism and despair. - Wikimedia Commons 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. She was photographed before her execution, as was normal for condemned prisoners. However, according to them, "the archival evidence from the secret police rejects the astronomically high estimates often given for the number of terror victims" and "the data available at this point make it clear that the number shot in the two worst purge years [193738] was more likely in the hundreds of thousands than in the millions. Trotsky survived the purge, though he would be assassinated in 1940 by the NKVD on the orders of Stalin. [original research?] Genrikh Yagoda - Wikipedia Yezhov oversaw falsified accusations in the Kirov murder case against opposition leaders Kamenev, Zinoviev and their supporters. 00447 decreed 10,000 executions for this contingent, but at least three times more were shot in the course of the secret mass operation, the majority in MarchApril 1938. 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). He denied he was a spy, but admitted most other charges. In 1988, for instance, the mass graves at Kurapaty in Belarus were the site of a clash between demonstrators and the police. 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 . 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. | " ", "Book Review of Beria Stalin's First Lieutenant by Amy Knight", " , 01.01.1904-21.11.1938", Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940, Interrogations of Nikolai Ezhov, former People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, "The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of images in Stalin's Russia", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikolai_Yezhov&oldid=1157024432, This page was last edited on 25 May 2023, at 20:36. Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov (Russian: ; 20 January [O.S. In the [Russian] Civil War, was a political commissar in the Red Army, later held same post in a province. The 1934 Party Congress elected Kirov to the central committee with only three votes against, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received 292 votes against. In many cases those arrested were forced to sign blank pages which were later filled in with a fabricated confession by the interrogators. [42] Four of the other five were executed; the fifth, Leon Trotsky, had been forced into exile outside the Soviet Union in 1929, but was assassinated in Mexico by Soviet agent Ramn Mercader in 1940. Particularly vulnerable to repression were also the so-called "special settlers" (spetzpereselentsy) who were under permanent police surveillance and constituted a huge pool of potential "enemies" to draw on. I incriminated myself in the hope that by telling them lies I could end the ordeal. [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. Benito Mussolini circulated a famous photograph of himself riding victorious atop a horseafter cropping out the handler holding the horse. It can be a way of literallyerasing todays political enemies from tomorrows picture of historyand making the future as unreliable as a present filled with propaganda and lies. [2] In 1913, he moved to St. Petersburg to work at the Putilov steel works. Add photos, demo reels Add to list. 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. IMDbPro. "[142], It is quite possible that Yezhov misled Stalin about the aspects of the purge process. Died At Age: 44 Family: Spouse/Ex-: Antonia Titova, Yevgenia Feigenberg, Antonia Titova (m. 1919 - div. And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen."[29][30]. [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], 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. "Who plotted against whom? [citation needed], The victims were convicted in absentia and in camera by extrajudicial organsthe NKVD troikas sentenced indigenous "enemies" under NKVD Order No. "Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD During the 1930s." A. N. Yakovlev. Nikolai Bukharin and others convicted in the Moscow Trials were not rehabilitated until as late as 1988. The commission worked in 19561957. [137], Historians with archival access have confirmed that Stalin was intimately involved in the purge. Stalin didnt have Photoshopbut that didnt keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Some others view the Great Purge as a crucial moment, or rather the culmination, of a vast social engineering campaign started at the beginning of the 1930s (Hagenloh, 2000; Shearer, 2003; Werth, 2003). 32 Facts About Nikolai Yezhov | FactSnippet [154], On 30 October 2017, President Vladimir Putin opened the Wall of Sorrow, an official but controversial recognition of the crimes of the Soviet regime. and that "the cases were reviewed and some people were released"[146]. [97] However, the toll was especially high among writers. "[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". [28], Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups).
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