Word: yezhovshchina
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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 to anything that went on in Nazi concentration camps. The papers referred to Yezhov almost as lyrically as to Stalin: "Our hero, our father...
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