Word: yezhov
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...monster himself, sitting at Joseph Stalin's right hand--or in his savage vicinity--for decades as cheerleader, yes-man and ideological dogsbody: a "nice guy," as his Kremlin cronies called him, who cheerfully survived Stalin's almost recreational paranoia even when so many of the evil crew (including Yezhov and Beria) were led offstage and shot...
...came under suspicion on two occasions. During the period when members of the Comintern, or Communist International, started disappearing into the meat grinder, the Polish representatives were virtually all arrested and shot as enemy agents. I came to Moscow from the Ukraine for a Central Committee meeting. Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the secret police, and I were standing around, and Stalin came over. He shoved his finger into my shoulder and said, "What's your name...
...Well," he answered, "I'm just telling you what I heard from Yezhov...
...Yezhov started to deny saying any such thing. Stalin then called Georgi Malenkov, who was at that time in charge of cadres for the Moscow party organization, as his witness, saying now that he was the one who had told him that I was really a Pole. Malenkov too denied he had said anything of the kind. The hunt for Poles had reached the point that Stalin was ready to turn Russians into Poles...
When the poet Anna Akhmatova was waiting in line outside a prison in Lenin grad during a time of political apocalypse - the Yezhov terror - a woman with lips blue from the cold asked her, "Can you describe this...