Word: yezhov
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...least fictional verisimilitude. Stalin's bosom friend, Ordjonikidze, poisoned by Stalin's orders, shouts into a telephone as he lies dying: "Koba, I go, but you will follow me."- Red Army Marshal Tukhachevsky refuses to confess, and is felled by a bullet from the NKVD chief, Nikolai Yezhov. Red Army Marshal Blucher is called before the Politburo, where Stalin praises him as a genius. Marshal Voroshilov sends Blucher a look, as if to say: "Deny it. Say you haven't any genius...
...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...