Moscow — The man who orchestrated one of the bloodiest chapters in Soviet history, Nikolai Yezhov, was dragged screaming from a closed courtroom and executed in a soundproofed Moscow basement on February 4, 1940, his body cremated and his ashes dumped into a common grave in a killing that the Soviet state concealed for years.
Yezhov, the former head of the NKVD secret police, had overseen the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938, a terror campaign that saw more than one million people arrested and nearly 700,000 shot on charges of crimes against the state. He was 44 years old when he died.
His execution marked the final turn of a brutal cycle of violence he himself had set in motion, and it came less than two years after he stood at the pinnacle of Soviet power, second only to Joseph Stalin in the fear he inspired across the country.
Born on May 1, 1895, in St. Petersburg, Yezhov cultivated the image of a proletarian revolutionary. Interrogators later discovered he came from a well-off peasant family and that his father had held several jobs, including running a brothel.
He completed elementary school, worked briefly as a tailor’s assistant, and then entered military service.
He served in the Imperial Russian Army before joining the Bolsheviks in 1917, months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War he fought for the Red Army, rising steadily through military and party ranks, serving on regional committees and later heading the party’s accounting department.
His ascent continued through a series of posts, including Deputy People’s Commissar of Agriculture, before he was elected to the Central Committee and became its secretary. But the turning point in his career came after the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov, the Bolshevik chief of Leningrad.
Stalin seized on the killing as a pretext for mass repression and identified Yezhov as the man willing to carry out the bloody work. Yezhov oversaw the accusations that justified the purges and soon took command of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
As People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, the devout Stalin loyalist showed no hesitation in destroying political opponents. His first major target was his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda. Yezhov ordered a show trial and directed NKVD agents to place mercury on the curtains in Yagoda’s office to manufacture evidence.
Yagoda was accused of being a German spy and of plotting to poison both Yezhov and Stalin to restore capitalism. Yezhov personally tortured Yagoda to secure a confession. Yagoda was shot on Yezhov’s orders, the first of hundreds of thousands.
The Great Purge reached its peak in 1937 and 1938. Anyone deemed disloyal was liable to be executed by firing squads at Yezhov’s disposal. Roughly half of Soviet government officials and military officers were stripped of their ranks and jobs, with some sent to the gulag system and many shot without trial.
Ordinary citizens were not spared. Neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances were swept up in a wave of denunciations, interrogated, tortured, dismissed from their jobs, and killed. Yezhov became the most feared man in the Soviet Union, surpassed only by Stalin himself.
He defended the slaughter of the innocent with chilling indifference. “There will be some innocent victims in this fight against fascist agents,” Yezhov said. “We are launching a major attack on the enemy.
Let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better than 10 innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”
Well over one million people were arrested during 1937 and 1938, and nearly 700,000 were shot. The gulag population swelled dramatically, and around 140,000 prisoners died from mistreatment, starvation, and exhaustion during Yezhov’s tenure.
But the man who built his career on purging others would not escape the machinery he helped create. Stalin, who had used Yezhov as a pawn, concluded that his enforcer had accumulated too much power. The instrument of his downfall was Lavrentiy Beria, the NKVD chief who would succeed him.
Beria had survived Yezhov’s purge after Stalin spared him, impressed by his efficiency. Over the following months, Beria steadily stripped Yezhov of influence. Yezhov saw what was coming.
He predicted his own death, turned to alcoholism, and in his final days refused to go to work at the NKVD.
Stalin publicly criticized the NKVD’s performance under Yezhov, laying the groundwork for his removal. Some of Yezhov’s best agents vanished in attempts to save themselves. Yezhov warned one of his closest advisers that he too might be persecuted, and he told his wife he wanted a divorce.
On November 25, 1938, Yezhov was removed from his post. Beria assumed control of the secret police. Stalin initially ignored his former enforcer, then instructed Beria to slander him at the annual conference of the Supreme Soviet.
In 1939, Yezhov was stripped of all his positions.
On April 10, 1939, he was arrested and taken to prison in utmost secrecy, away from public view and the NKVD offices, to prevent any resistance. During interrogation he admitted to being an enemy of the people and acknowledged that his execution was inevitable.
Yezhov confessed to theft of government money, treason through collaboration with Hitler’s Gestapo, and gross incompetence. He was tried in a closed proceeding where he professed his love for Stalin and said he would do anything for him.
He recanted the confessions, claiming he had admitted to the charges only under torture. He insisted he had carried out the Great Purge out of nothing but admiration for Stalin, and he declared that when he died, Stalin’s name would be his final words.
After the trial he was taken away, then called back 30 minutes later to hear the verdict. He collapsed as he realized what was happening. Nikolai Yezhov, once the most powerful secret police chief in the Soviet Union, was condemned to die.
An appeal for clemency was denied. He was dragged from the room screaming and crying. Days later, on February 4, 1940, he was taken to a basement in a small NKVD station in Moscow.
The basement was effectively a purpose-built execution chamber with a sloped floor, designed so that blood covering the floor and walls could be hosed down easily. It is said Yezhov himself had ordered the chamber built to make executions during the Great Purge efficient and quick.
A main execution chamber existed in the basement, but it was deliberately avoided so that Yezhov’s death would remain completely secret. He was lined up in a small room, and an executioner, either the infamous Soviet executioner Vasily Blokhin or Ivan Serov, the future KGB chairman, stood behind him with a weapon primed.
They shot Yezhov dead. The chamber was quickly cleaned to ensure no one knew what had happened. His body was dragged from the building and immediately cremated, and his ashes were placed in a common grave.
The execution remained a state secret for years. Many in Soviet society believed Yezhov had been committed to an asylum because of his alcoholism. He became known as the “vanishing commissar,” erased from history in a literal sense.
Stalin ordered official press photographs altered to remove Yezhov from the record entirely, airbrushing him out of images alongside the leader he had served with such brutality. His name was expunged from archives, his role in Soviet history rewritten.
Historians regard Yezhov’s fate as a defining example of the terror he unleashed. The man who ordered the torture and execution of hundreds of thousands was himself tortured, condemned in secret, and killed in a basement built for the very purpose he had perfected.
His downfall was calculated by Beria and Stalin, and his execution carried out with the same secrecy and efficiency he had once demanded of his own agents. In the end, the Great Purger became one of its final victims, shot in the dark and reduced to ashes in an unmarked grave.