Word: yezhov
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Communists have spent years and millions telling the world that the "excesses" of the Soviet regime were to be accounted the inevitable evils of a violent transition. For such a period, fanatics like Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov were inevitable choices as wielders of the purifying pistol. The transition, however, obviously ends...
...succeeded by a shrieking little man named Nikolai Yezhov, who wanted to get back at the world for the years he had spent in bitter poverty. He began his reign by purging the ranks of the NKVD, successor to the OGPU. Next he purged Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and practically the entire High Command of the Red Army. He gave his name to two of the Red Terror's maddest years (1936-38), the "Yezhovshchina." In the Yezhovshchina, the most fantastic denunciations were accepted at face value by the NKVD; no one was safe. Terror was completely indiscriminate, torture equal...
After two years, Stalin called a hait. Yezhov disappeared. Some think he is still in an insane asylum. In 1938, with war threatening in Europe, began the reign of Lavrenty Beria...
Beria; he is the normalcy of the Soviet state. Has he established a society whose normal members can be trusted to "keep order"? In a way, yes. An active Yezhov-type terror no longer stalks Russia. Most Soviet citizens go to bed at night without fearing that Beria's MVD will pound on their doors. This security, however, is bought at a terrible price. The Russian people live in a sort of "house arrest." They dare not shift from city to city in search of work. They do not talk or even think too long about how they...
...Beria's four predecessors in the C.H.E.K.A., Ogpit, N.K.V.D.: Felix Dzerzhinsky (1917-26), relieved and died of heart attack 1926; Viacheslav Menshinsky (1926-34), died in office 1934! Genrikh Yagoda (1934-36), relieved in 1936, shot for treason 1938; Nikolai Yezhov (1936-38), relieved in 1938, disappeared from public view in 1939, believed dead or insane...