Nikolai Yezhov
NKVD director under Joseph Stalin (1895-1940) · Politicians · Died at 44
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Something wrong?He ran the Soviet secret police at the apex of the Great Purge, signing off on mass arrests, torture, and executions from 1936 to 1938. Then Stalin turned the machine on him.
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About this person
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was born 1 May 1895 and rose to head the NKVD in 1936, just as Stalin's Great Purge gathered force. For two years he organized the apparatus of mass terror: arrests by quota, forced confessions, executions. By 1938 Stalin had soured on him. Yezhov was removed, then arrested, and under interrogation confessed to anti-Soviet activity and to making "unfounded arrests" during the very campaign he had orchestrated. He was executed 4 February 1940, one of the officials blamed for the purge's excesses after the fact.
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