Ezhov, Nickolai Ivanovich (1895-1940)

Soviet party and government official whose name is associated with the height of Stalinist terror in 1937-1938. Ezhov had no formal education, having spent less than a year at a grammar school. The details of his early biography are unclear, as are the circumstances of his joining the Russian revolutionary movement. His career climb began in May 1924, when he was elected delegate to the 13th Communist Party Congress in Moscow. In 1926, he was sent to study Marxism-Leninism for a year at the Communist Academy in Moscow, and in mid-1927, he was appointed instructor in an important department of the Communist Party. In late 1930, Ezhov became head of the department which controlled the selection and appointment of Party cadres. At that time, he became part of Stalin’s inner circle.

From 1933 to 1936, Ezhov supervised the purge of party cadres. In 1934, he was elected to the Party Central Committee and became Deputy Chairman of the Party Control Commission. That same year, Ezhov took part in the reorganization of OGPU, the Soviet security agency, and the organization of its successor agency, the NKVD.

Beginning in late 1934, Ezhov became Stalin’s de facto representative at the NKVD, gradually assuming control over its operations. In February 1935, he was elected Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee and later Chairman of the Party Control Commission – which made him the de facto supreme judge of the Party. In August 1935, at Stalin’s suggestion, Ezhov was elected to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, in which capacity he presided over the purge of political émigrés. In 1936, he played a leading role in staging the first Moscow political trial. On October 1 of that year, he became the Narcom, or Commissar, of the NKVD. As head of the NKVD, Ezhov was one of the major executors of the mass repressions known as the “great terror.”

In November 1938, Ezhov was forced to resign as head of the NKVD, to be succeeded by Lavrentii Beria. He was arrested in April 1939 and was later charged with espionage conspiracy and outright violations of the law. In February 1940, he was sentenced to death and executed. ¹