Stalin полностью

In Boris Yefimov’s celebrated cartoons, Yezhov was depicted with an oversized gloved fist crushing shrunken enemies. In person, he stood a mere five feet tall (1.51 meters), had a prominent scar on his right cheek (a civil war injury) and yellowish teeth (something he shared with Stalin), and walked with a pronounced limp, a gait even worse than the despot’s. He was beset by a hacking cough from tuberculosis, myasthenia and neurasthenia, anemia, angina, sciatica, psoriasis, and even malnutrition, ailments of long standing. One old revolutionary said Yezhov reminded him of slum children whose favorite occupation was to tie paraffin-soaked paper to a cat’s tail and set fire to it.¹⁰ Around 1930, Yezhov had begun to indulge in drinking benders, to the point of losing consciousness. One of his drinking companions had been Fyodor Konar (Polashchuk), who used to bring along prostitutes. (Konar had been arrested in January 1933 as a Polish spy and executed two months later for “sabotage in agriculture.”) Another drinking buddy, Lev Maryasin, a former coworker in the personnel department of the central apparatus who had become head of the state bank and deputy finance commissar, used to compete with Yezhov in farting competitions. (Maryasin, too, was arrested, by Yezhov’s NKVD.)¹¹ Stalin allowed Yezhov various leaves, spending hard currency on treatments abroad, but the illnesses, along with Yezhov’s propensity for daytime drinking, took a toll. “Yezhov not only drank,” recalled Zinaida Glikina, a friend of Yezhov’s wife, Yevgeniya. “In addition, he deteriorated and lost the visage not only of a Communist but of a human being.”

As Yezhov fanatically prosecuted the terror, in early 1937 his teeth began to fall out. He suffered from appetite loss, dizziness, and insomnia. Doctors diagnosed overwork and ordered a long holiday, which Yezhov deemed out of the question.¹² In April 1937, one of his subordinates had suggested the cause might be meals at the NKVD canteen, where undiscovered enemies could be lurking. The Red Army’s chemical warfare academy was called in and “found” trace elements of mercury in Yezhov’s office. An NKVD employee was tortured and confessed, implicating Yagoda in an assassination attempt. Traces of mercury were suddenly found in Yezhov’s former apartment (on Bolshoi Kiselny), in his new one (in the Kremlin), and at his dacha (in Meshcherino); all were ventilated, and the mercury vanished. No one explained how the inaccessible residences had become contaminated. But Yezhov now had his urine checked regularly, and switched offices inside NKVD headquarters.¹³ He was reported to have created a circuitous, one-way route to his Lubyanka suite—up to the fifth floor, down to the first, then up to the third, as if he were under threat from the agency he commanded.¹⁴

Could this alcoholic, increasingly infirm, frightened Lilliputian creature have been responsible for Soviet state security? Yezhov, of course, was an instrument. It was not he—and not a rebellious military command, as in Spain—who originated the mass violence in the USSR.¹⁵ But Stalin goaded him relentlessly: “Comrade Yezhov. Very important. It is necessary to go through the Udmurt, Mari-El, Chuvash, and Mordovian republics, to go through with a whip.”¹⁶

Back in tsarist Russia, General Alexander Gerasimov, the head of the okhranka in St. Petersburg, met with Nicholas II just once during his entire career; political policing was viewed as necessary, but not necessarily honorable, work. That had changed: in 1935 and 1936, Yagoda had been in Stalin’s office every month, sometimes more than once. From January 1937 through August 1938, an interval during which Stalin received visitors on 333 days, Yezhov would make 288 appearances, second only to Molotov. How often they additionally met at the Near Dacha or spoke on the telephone remains unknown. Stalin sometimes played chess with him.¹⁷ The Bloody Dwarf, as Yezhov was known in whispers, cleansed enemies out of conviction, but also to please his master, just as Yezhov’s subordinates showed fanaticism in terror to please him. His three concurrent positions—NKVD chief, Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party Control Commission—rendered him as knowledgeable about Stalin’s thinking as anyone.¹⁸ “A teacher with a pupil, an eagle with an eaglet,” the Stalinist writer-enforcer Alexander Fadeyev wrote of the despot and his protégé. “Stalin tends to him lovingly, like a gardener tends to a beloved tree.”¹⁹ Yezhov returned Stalin’s favor with nonpareil zeal and brutality.²⁰