Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940
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Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940
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| ISBN-13: | 9780817929060 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 955,866 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Stalin's Loyal Executioner
People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895â"1940
By Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov
Hoover Institution Press
Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-2906-0
CHAPTER 1
Early Career
According to his official biography, Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov had the right proletarian origin. He was born on 1 May (19 April, OS) 1895 in the Russian capital St. Petersburg, the son of a poor metalworker, a founder. But during interrogation, after his arrest in April 1939, he stated that he had been born in Mariiampole, a provincial town in southwest Lithuania, not far from the Polish border (later Kapsukas) and at that time part of the Russian empire. He had moved to Petersburg only in 1906, when he was eleven years old. After the revolution he started to assert that he was born there.
Ezhov also confessed that his father had not been an industrial worker at all. On the contrary, having been called up for military service, Ivan Ezhov, a Russian from Volkhonshino village in the Krapivna district to the southwest of Tula, joined a musical detachment in Mariiampole, where he married the conductor's maid. After demobilization he became a forest warden and then a pointsman in the railway service. In 1902–3, according to his son's words, he kept a tearoom, in fact serving as a brothel. From 1905 to 1914, after the tearoom closed, the elder Ezhov worked as a house painter. Even worse from the proletarian point of view, he was a small contractor who employed two wage laborers. Ivan Ezhov died in 1919, after some years of a debilitating illness.
Nor did the other half of Nikolai Ezhov's origins suit later requirements. His official biography fails to note that his mother, Anna Antonovna Ezhova (born c. 1864) — the conductor's maid — was Lithuanian. Ezhov himself acknowledged in a questionnaire in 1924 that since childhood he could make himself understood in Polish and Lithuanian as well as Russian; three years later such origins were no longer appropriate and he stated that he knew only Russian.
Ezhov had a sister, Evdokiia, some two years his senior, and also a brother, Ivan, who was born in 1897 in Veivery, Mariiampole district. The two brothers did not get along well. Later, Nikolai told his nephew Viktor, Evdokiia's son, that Ivan, though two years younger, beat him up systematically, and once did so with a guitar in a street fight, an act that Nikolai never forgot. In 1939, during investigation, Nikolai related that before being called up for the army in 1916, Ivan had belonged to a criminal gang. In the autumn of 1938, in a letter intended for Stalin, he wrote that his brother had been a "half-criminal element" and that since childhood he had not maintained any ties with him.
Nikolai Ezhov attended primary school (probably a parish school) for no more than a year; according to the data of his later criminal case, he had an "unfinished primary education." In 1906, at eleven years of age, he was sent to Petersburg as apprentice to a tailor. From 1909 on, he was an apprentice and then a metalworker at several Petersburg factories. He spent more than a year in Lithuania and Poland in search of work, holding jobs in Kovno (later Kaunas), as an apprentice metalworker at the Til'mans works, and in other towns as hired help to craftsmen.
In 1914–15 he was employed in a Petrograd frame workshop, the Nedermeier and the Putilov works. At that time he took part in some strikes and demonstrations. In spite of his lack of schooling, he was rather well read and among workers had the nickname "Nicky the booklover" (Kol'ka knizhnik). In a questionnaire of the early 1920s he stated that he was "literate (self-taught)." In connection with a strike at the Treugol'nik factory he was arrested and exiled from Petrograd. In 1915 (he was then twenty years old), he was called up for army duty, first in the 76th infantry depot regiment and then in the 172d infantry Libavskii regiment, but he was soon wounded on the German front near Alitus (just to the west of Vilnius) and sent on leave for six months. He returned to the Putilov works. Later in the same year he was called up again, assigned first as a soldier in the 3d infantry regiment in Novo-Petergof, and then as a soldier-worker in a noncombatant detachment in the Dvinsk military district. In 1916 he became a foreman in the Fifth Artillery Workshop of the Northern Front in Vitebsk.
Later, a fellow soldier of those days described how Ezhov once, in some way having got hold of the right ribbon, had posed as a holder of the St. George Cross. During the 1930s, such an episode was not, of course, correct form, and this part of Ezhov's biography accordingly was painted in the style of revolutionary romanticism, emphasizing rebelliousness and punishment. In the late 1930s, Aleksandr Fadeev was commissioned to write Ezhov's biography. He fulfilled the task, and the manuscript of a small book went to the publishing house. Although Ezhov was arrested before the biography could be printed, part of Fadeev's manuscript was preserved among Ezhov's papers, under the title "Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov: Child of Indigence and Struggle" (1937–38). "He was a small, dark-haired young man, with an open and stubborn face, with a sudden boyish smile and adroit precise movements of his small hands," Fadeev wrote. He goes on to say:
He was a small Petersburg workman, very restrained and modest, with a clear, calm, and firm look from under his dark, beautiful eyebrows. He loved reading and poetry and now and then scribbled a few lines himself. He was a thoughtful and cordial friend, a good chap, in leisure time loving to play the guitar, to sing and dance, fearless in front of the authorities. Among his comrades he enjoyed a great deal of love and influence.
Rather a similar description was that of A. Drizul, who knew Ezhov as a fellow workman at the artillery workshop No. 5. In an interview with Isaak Mints of the Institute of Party History, Drizul described "Kolia" as "a smart, lively chap," "loved by all, sharp in conversations with other workmen." According to Drizul, Ezhov had been active in the Red Guard even before joining the Party, but he was "not much of a platform speaker." Drizul added: "He was a painstaking orator, a characteristic he kept to this day. He did not like to make speeches." This is how the Institute of Party History edited Drizul's recollections: "Many workers ... knew Nikolai Ivanovich as a cheerful, sociable person, in conversations knowing how to put before them political questions of the most vital importance and finding convincing, correct answers to them. ... His characteristic was — 'fewer words, more deeds.'"
In his work of 1937, The Great Socialist Revolution in the USSR, Mints further glamorized Ezhov's past: "The Bolshevik fortress in Vitebsk was the Fifth Artillery Workshop of the Northern Front. It employed N. I. Ezhov, who had been dismissed from the Putilov works together with a few hundred fellow workers for their struggle against the imperialist war. Ezhov was sent to the army, to a depot battalion." After a strike, Mints went on, Ezhov was "thrown into a military convict prison, a penal battalion." In actual fact, there is no evidence that he took part in any soldiers' strike or rebellion.
Some present-day authors do continue to suggest that Ezhov's class instincts were formed in a highly politicized environment, at a time of increasing tension between workers and employers. R. W. Thurston, for example, suggests: "Perhaps this background made Ezhov less tolerant of managers and bureaucrats, on whom the Terror of the late 1930s fell particularly harshly." O. V. Khlevniuk, however, rightly points to the fact that Ezhov's later activity was not in the first place directed against the so-called economic specialists and that in several cases he even defended them. (For example, in 1933 he is said to have defended coal enterprise managers, who in some regions were sacked too frequently, strongly interfering with coal extraction.)
Ezhov's association with the Communist Party is equally unclear. His own testimony suggested that on 5 May 1917, following the February revolution, he joined the RSDRP(b), Lenin's Bolshevik (or Communist) Party; in a questionnaire of the early 1920s he reported that he had been a Party member since then. Evidence from the Institute of Party History indicates that on 3 August 1917 he joined the Vitebsk organization of the RSDRP (Internationalists); the United Internationalists, to whom the Vitebsk organization belonged, were an intermediate group between Bolshevism and Menshevism. At any rate, Ezhov did become the leader of the Party cell of artillery workshop No. 5, and from October 1917 to January 1918, he was assistant commissar and then commissar of Vitebsk station of the Riga-Orel railway line, organizing unit cells. With respect to the February and October revolutions of 1917, in the questionnaire of the early 1920s he responded that he "very actively participated in both of them," and in another questionnaire he stated that during the October revolution he took part in "disarming Cossacks and Polish legionaries." Mints exaggerated: "Lively and impetuous, he plunged into organization work from the very beginning of the revolution of 1917 on. Ezhov created a Red Guard, himself picked participants, himself instructed them, and obtained weapons." In any case, his active participation in the revolution of 1917 in Petrograd is a legend.
In early 1918 Nikolai Ezhov joined his family in Vyshnii Volochek, Tver' province, where he got a job at the Bolotin glassworks. He became a member of the factory committee, and from June 1918 to April 1919 he was a member of the district committee and head of the Party club. He also worked in a battalion of special destination in Zubtsov in the same province, until May 1919, when he was called up for the Red Army. He served in Saratov in a depot electrical engineering battalion, where he presided over the Party group and was presidium member of the military district. Twenty years later, during interrogation, Vladimir Konstantinov, who had evacuated the battalion from Petrograd to Saratov, recollected how in 1919, after quartering, Ezhov, "an urchin with torn boots," was appointed political instructor (politruk). They became friends, serving together until 1921. In August 1919, after evacuating to Kazan', Ezhov was appointed military commissar of the school of the Second Base of Radio Telegraph Units — which meant that he was charged with political work such as agitation. His biographer Fadeev again sparks up the image: he was actively engaged in battle, like the assault on Ivashchenko village, in which he was wounded by three shell-splinters, one of which pierced his jaw. "The severe injury disabled Ezhov for a long time. Throughout his life there remained a scar to the right of his chin"; and he describes a portrait of Ezhov of the time: "a still very young, black-haired chap with black eyebrows; a dreamy expression of his eyes with a strong curve in his lips — an inspired, strong-willed face."
In February 1920 Ezhov was reprimanded by the military tribunal of the Depot Army, of which his base was part, for insufficient vigilance that had resulted in the admission to the school of a number of deserters. This misstep had no consequences for his career, however, and in May he was promoted to military commissar of the Radio Units Base in Kazan'. Although his discipline and diligence in executing orders had already been noticed, still another stain was subsequently found on his reputation. After his fall, the Chekist S. F. Redens testified that Ezhov had on at least one occasion privately boasted about having come out against Lenin and having been an adherent of the anti-intellectual Machajski movement. In 1936 in a registration form Ezhov stated that he had belonged to the "Workers' Opposition" within the Communist Party but had broken with it before the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921. Four years later, before the court, he admitted only to having sympathized with the Opposition, adding that he had never been a member and that after Lenin's criticism of March 1921 he had recognized its deceit and had lined up behind Lenin.
That was a good move, for in April 1921 Ezhov became a member of the bureau and head of the agitation and propaganda department of one of Kazan's district Party committees, and in July he assumed the same functions in the Tatar provincial Party committee. At about the same time, he was demobilized from the army and was then elected to the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Tatar Republic. In August, suffering from work stress, he was granted a leave and the right to enter one of Moscow's sanatoriums for medical treatment; at the recommendation of the Central Committee, he was in the Kremlin hospital from 18 January to 13 February 1922, for treatment of colitis, anemia, and lung catarrh. By then, clearly, he was already fairly prominent, and in Moscow he probably associated with influential people from the Central Committee apparatus, like Lazar' Kaganovich and Mendel' Khataevich, people who had become acquainted with him in Belorussia. It resulted in a responsible assignment: on 15 February 1922 the Central Committee Secretariat appointed him Secretary of the Party Committee of the Mari Autonomous Province. Because this was an important assignment, it is conceivable that in this connection he had his first conversation with Stalin.
Ezhov's assignment in the small provincial capital, Krasnokokshaisk (now Ioshkar-Ola), got off to a bad start in March: the Bureau of the Provincial Party Committee only accepted him after an initial refusal, and I. P. Petrov, the chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee, from the very beginning was openly hostile, mainly because of Ezhov's dismissal of concern for the native language or culture as "national chauvinism." Ezhov's biographers agree that "the worst sides of his character revealed themselves," and they note his "lust for power, arrogance, rudeness." He showed a purely administrative attitude, refusing to take into account the national peculiarities of the province. Even an instructor from the central apparatus did not succeed in calming people's feelings. In October 1922 Ezhov requested a leave of absence, again citing stress: "From the February revolution on I have not taken a holiday. In February of this year I was sent to the Mari province straight from the hospital. I have been worn out completely. At present I suffer from almost seven illnesses." The Bureau of the Provincial Committee complied with the request and granted him a leave of one month, plus an allowance of 300 million rubles (not a huge amount at the time) for medical treatment "in view of a number of serious illnesses." His place was filled temporarily by a colleague. He had served in Krasnokokshaisk for only seven months.
Instead of going straight to a health resort, however, Ezhov returned to Kazan', writing in a letter that he liked "Tatariia better than Marlandiia." From there he went to Moscow, where in late October he attended a session of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets. (On that occasion a photograph seems to have been taken of Lenin, surrounded by a group of delegates, one of them Ezhov.) The Central Committee authorities had agreed not to send him back to Krasnokokshaisk but rather, after a rest period of a month, to transfer him to another province or another branch. The expensiveness of Moscow during the NEP seemed shocking, and on 6 November he wrote that he "had already started to be pretty much out of commission" and was going to the North Caucasian health resort of Kislovodsk for medical treatment, though he "did not have a red cent." On 28 November he was already in a Kislovodsk sanatorium, apparently having applied for an extension of his leave period; in a telegram of that date he asked the Central Committee authorities to let him know in case his request had been positively judged.
The request seems to have been granted, for on 1 March 1923, at a meeting of the Orgburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee in Moscow (with Stalin present), Ezhov was appointed Secretary of the Party committee of Semipalatinsk province in the northeast of what was then called the Kirgiz (later Kazakh) Republic. Although Ezhov himself was not at the meeting, as in 1922, Stalin may have interviewed him in connection with the important appointment. Ezhov was granted nine days' leave to go to Krasnokokshaisk in order to hand things over, but instead he went again to Kazan', perhaps hoping to find work there. On 9 March, in a letter to his former colleague from the Mari provincial Party committee, P. N. Ivanov, he noted that he had heard that "you have sacked Petrov" but that to his displeasure an Orgburo commission had decided to send Petrov back to the Mari province. Nine days later he wrote that he was going to Semipalatinsk.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stalin's Loyal Executioner by Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov. Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Chapter 1 Early Career,
Chapter 2 Directing the Purges and Supervising the NKVD,
Chapter 3 State Security Chief,
Chapter 4 The Great Terror,
Chapter 5 Apogee,
Chapter 6 Decline,
Chapter 7 Fall,
Chapter 8 Enemy of the People,
Chapter 9 Concluding Remarks,
Notes,
Index,