Concluding Remarks

9 Concluding Remarks We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik, we will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly. —I. V. Stalin, November 1937 What kind of man was Nikolai Ezhov? At five feet tall, or 151 cm., he was extremely short.1 In order to correct his small stature, he apparently used to wear high-heeled boots.2 He is also reported to have had a slight limp. He was quite thin and frail. He had a small, rather expressionless face, with a sickly yellowish skin, and protruding ears.3 His hair was dark, an irregular, shining crew cut. On his right cheek he had a scar, the result of an injury from the civil war time. He had bad, yellow teeth, which makes plausi- ble indeed the report that after the alleged mercury affair they began falling out. More than anything, his eyes stuck in people’s memory: they were ‘‘grey-green, fastening themselves upon his collocutor like gimlets, clever as the eyes of a cobra,’’ wrote Dmi- trii Shepilov.4 Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov described them as ‘‘the greedy eyes of a hyena.’’5 In general, however, Shepilov found him ‘‘shabby,’’ ‘‘insignificant,’’ when in the autumn of 1937 he talked with him in his Central Committee office. He was dressed simply, in army-issue trousers and blouse; his rather coarse boots were reddish from lack of care.6 He seems to have had a ‘‘soft monoto- nous voice,’’7 a baritone, and he occasionally sang romances and .......................... 9199$$ $CH9 02-05-02 16:08:01 PS 196 Stalin’s Loyal Executioner Russian folk songs rather well.8 According to Fadeev, in his leisure time he loved to play the guitar and to sing and dance. He was not notable for strong health. In the early 1930s he was diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs, myas- thenia, neurasthenia, anemia, malnutrition, angina, and sciatica. In addition, he seems to have had psoriasis.9 He had a long history of illnesses. In 1916 he was wounded and sent on leave for six months. Something similar happened during the civil war. In 1922, after falling ill from exhaustion, he was treated in the Kremlin hospital for colitis, anemia, and lung catarrh. Later in the Before the fall: Ezhov on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, 1 May 1938. (Memorial collection) .......................... 9199$$ $CH9 02-05-02 16:08:12 PS Concluding Remarks 197 same year he was granted a leave, for he was ‘‘worn out com- pletely’’ and suffered from ‘‘almost seven illnesses’’; he was treated in Kislovodsk. In the summer of 1927 he underwent a koumiss cure in the Urals. During the summer of 1934 the Polit- buro sent him abroad for medical treatment, and he was treated in a Vienna sanatorium for several weeks. In September 1935 he had become overworked again; on Stalin’s instigation, the Polit- buro gave him a leave of two months and sent him abroad for treatment (from 1937 on, however, such trips abroad were no longer made). Shortly after his appointment as NKVD chief in September 1936, the mercury affair allegedly made him sick, and when in November 1938 he was dismissed, his ‘‘state of ill health’’ was taken into consideration. Indeed, after his dismissal he wrote that during the past two years his nervous system had been overstrained and he had started to suffer from hypochon- dria. After his arrest, in early 1940, he fell ill; the doctors diagnosed pneumonia, and he was transferred to a prison hospital. His consumptive condition did not promote good manners. Dur- ing the talk with Shepilov, he ‘‘coughed heavily and strainedly’’: ‘‘He coughed and spit out straight on the luxurious carpet heavy clots of slime.’’10 His health was probably affected by his addiction to alcohol. After August 1938 it reportedly exceeded previous bounds, even the drinking bouts in the late 1920s together with Konar and Pia- takov. By 1933–35 he was drinking heavily in a systematic way.11 According to Serafima Ryzhova, his personal secretary for ten years, drinking bouts with his NKVD adjutants took a central place in his working day.12 In early 1939 Andreev, Beriia, and Malenkov reported on having ascertained Ezhov’s ‘‘constant drunkenness.’’ He ‘‘systematically arrived at work no earlier than at four or five in the afternoon, adapting the whole NKVD appa- ratus to this.’’13 At his trial, Ezhov did not deny that he ‘‘drank heavily,’’ but he added that he ‘‘worked like a horse.’’ ‘‘Where is my decay?’’ he objected.14 Although he was able to work very hard indeed, at other periods as a result of his ill health and alco- holism he gave the impression of being a rather poor functionary. .......................... 9199$$ $CH9 02-05-02 16:08:12 PS 198 Stalin’s Loyal Executioner One has only to think of the bad references after his service in the Mari province and the long periods of inactivity thereafter. He seems to have been bisexual. He was married twice; the first marriage went wrong, and the second one was not without frictions either. With no registered children of his own, he had an adopted daughter, who in her diary describes him as a loving father, although she did not see him very often. Apart from affairs with other women, from the age of fifteen Ezhov must have had sexual relationships with men. One should, of course, approach this information with caution, since it comes from a Stalinist in- vestigation, but Ezhov never denied his own confessions in this regard, in contrast to some of the other accusations. Some authors stress his low intellectual level, emphasizing that he did not even finish primary education. Without wanting to demonstrate the opposite, we should add that before the revolu- tion among co-workers he was known as ‘‘Nicky the booklover’’ and had the reputation of being well read. According to Fadeev, he loved reading and poetry and now and then scribbled a few lines himself. In a questionnaire of the early 1920s he answered that he was ‘‘literate (self taught).’’15 He also taught himself Marxism-Leninism. Fadeev describes how in the mid-1920s he used to sit over his books at night ‘‘in order to master the theory of Marx-Lenin-Stalin.’’ In 1926–27 he followed the one-year Marxist-Leninist Courses of the Central Committee. According to people who knew him, however, even in high positions he re- mained an ignoramus.16 Shepilov, for example, describes him as ‘‘a little cultured and in theoretical respect totally ignorant man.’’17 His texts were crude, full of errors in syntax and gram- mar, and he was not much of an orator either and did not like to make speeches. During the 1930s, Ezhov had offices in the Central Committee building on Staraia ploshchad’ (fifth floor), in NKVD headquar- ters in the Lubianka, and, after April 1938, at the People’s Com- missariat of Water Transportation. He had an apartment in the Kremlin, plus a luxurious dacha in Meshcherino, just outside Moscow, with its own film theater, tennis court, nanny, and so .......................... 9199$$ $CH9 02-05-02 16:08:12 PS Concluding Remarks 199 on. There is evidence that several thousand dollars were spent on packages from abroad for Ezhov’s wife. All this implies that— after the poverty of his youth and early career—he was not averse to ‘‘bourgeois’’ delights. Moreover, he seems to have been a col- lector. According to Lev Kassil’, Ezhov once showed him ‘‘numer- ous models of yachts and ships, either made by himself, or gath- ered in a unique collection.’’18 Rather macabre, on the other hand, was his collecting mania with respect to the bullets with which his more prominent victims had been executed. Ideologically, he was a radical and a quibbler, to such a degree that he had sometimes deviated from the correct official line. Dur- ing the early 1920s he had been at least a sympathizer of the Workers’ Opposition, and in later years he had had contacts with different oppositionists, like Piatakov, Mar’iasin, and Konar. Dur- ing the Mari episode, he made himself disliked by fighting ‘‘na- tional chauvinism.’’ In Kazakhstan, he vehemently opposed con- cessions to foreign capitalists. During the late 1920s he made a stand not just against the Rightists but against the ‘‘Party swamp’’ as well. He made a name for himself as a ‘‘Bolshevik Marat’’: a fanatic and bloodthirsty hangman, who did not know how to stop ‘‘purging,’’ made countless victims, and spared nobody, not even his close acquaintances.19 However, in this respect testimonies from the 1920s rather unanimously show him from quite a different side. At that time he seems to have been, on the contrary, well meaning, attentive, responsive, humane, gentle, tactful, free of ar- rogance and bureaucratic manners, helpful, modest, rather agree- able, quiet, somewhat shy. By consequence, somewhere around 1930 he had changed, or another side of his character had emerged. From that time on he had the reputation of being fanatic, radical, cruel, immoral, ruth- less, uncompromising. He saw enemies and conspiracies every- where. He did not even spare those whom he had worked with and whose loyalty toward the Soviet regime he knew. He did not lift a finger for their acquittal or the mollification of their fate. For example, when in October 1937 the former chief of the Second Base of Radio-Telegraph Units—that is, his superior in 1919, A.T.

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