Leader
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov · 1895–1940
Official photograph. Wikimedia Commons.
Yezhov gave his name to the Yezhovshchina: the mass operations of 1937–38, when the police shot people against quotas.
Origin and religion
Born in Saint Petersburg to a Russian working-class family. People’s commissar of internal affairs, 1936–1938. Signatory of NKVD Order 00447.
Russian family. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- People’s commissar of internal affairs, 1936–1938
- Secretary of the Central Committee
- Signatory of NKVD Order 00447
Order 00447 of 30 July 1937, approved by the Politburo, divided “anti-Soviet elements” into category 1 (shoot) and category 2 (camp) and assigned numbers by region. Local chiefs often asked for higher quotas. Moscow often agreed. Parallel “national operations” targeted Poles, Germans, Latvians, Koreans, and others as such.
The record
About 680,000 to 700,000 people were executed in 1937–38, according to the NKVD’s own statistical reports opened in the 1990s. Yezhov was removed in late 1938, blamed for “excesses” he had been promoted to commit, and shot on 4 February 1940. Stalin kept the system and changed the name at the top.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Russian
- Nikolai Bukharin — Editor of Pravda
- Vyacheslav Molotov — Chairman of Sovnarkom, 1930–1941
- Nikolai Krylenko — Briefly supreme commander after October
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