Word: ezhovshchina
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...enough to the late Dictator Stalin to address him by his nickname "Koba" was a fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze (rhymes roughly with poor-Johnny-kids-me), an oldtime Bolshevik who had risen to be top commissar of heavy industry. One day in 1936, during what Russians now call the Ezhovshchina (the purge which carried off some 7,000,000 Russians to Siberian prison camps and mass graves), Ordzhonikidze learned that his precious engineers were being arrested. Victor (1 Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, a minor executive of the Commissariat, later told of Ordzhoni-kidze's telephone call to Stalin...
...party official in Georgia at the time Ordzhonikidze was commissar, probably had nothing to do with his murder. The logic, so far as Russia's present rulers were concerned, was the need to keep Beria's name before the people as the man responsible for the reckless Ezhovshchina. The West could only guess what pressures inside the Soviet Union made this still necessary, 18 years later, unless it was the identity of the real murderer...
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