Word: yezhov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...youthful political commissar in the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war, Shelepin rose through the Young Communist organization and served as its secretary from 1952 until he joined Khrushchev's headquarters staff last year. Too young to have been active in the police terrorist years of Yezhov and Beria, Shelepin has not yet acquired the hateful public reputation that goes with the job. Two things stand out about his appointment: 1) he is a party bureaucrat, indicating the party's continuing dominance; 2) he is Khrushchev...
...successors, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, and Yezhov, were either political nonentities or scapegoats in purges. Beria's rise, the author believes, was evidence of Stalin's tutelage rather than a boost from NKVD leadership...
...that he was an imperialist spy. In court he cracked: "If I had been a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services-there would have been no need for them to have maintained such a mass of spies." He was executed, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a madman who carried on the slaughter to the point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader and teacher Stalin," had his own group of pupils, among them a fat, pallid young man named Georgy Malenkov. After two years...
...almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive police organization the world has ever known...
...Orgburo and the Party Control Commission, by which Stalin organized himself into power after Lenin's death, and which later became a department of personnel in the Kremlin. Only such an apparatus could have arrested and destroyed former police chief Yagoda. From being dossier clerk to Yezhov, the young Malenkov is said to have graduated to secretarial head of this tidy personnel department. He may well have inherited the apparatus after Stalin's death...