Ukraine also got a new NKVD boss, Alexander Uspensky, whose overkill in Orenburg province had recommended him.130 “In January 1938, I went to a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet in Moscow,” Uspensky testified. “Yezhov unexpectedly summoned me. . . . Yezhov was completely drunk. On the table next to him was a bottle of brandy. Yezhov said to me: Well, are you going to Ukraine?” The appointment took effect on January 25.131 Uspensky replaced Israel Leplyovsky, who had run the NKVD special department and been the main organizer of the case materials in the annihilation of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army high command, then was demoted to Kiev, where he had exceeded the already sky-high arrest quotas for the republic, but Yezhov complained anyway.132 Uspensky, for his part, also had a great deal to make up for: he had been deputy Kremlin commandant under Yagoda, back in fall 1937, when Stalin summoned him to the Little Corner, along with Yezhov, Molotov, and Zhdanov, for thirty minutes and asked point-blank, “Was he honest and not recruited by Yagoda?” Yezhov intervened and said that Uspensky had regularly reported to him at the party apparatus on irregularities in Kremlin security.133 All the same, Yezhov, unsure how that visit to the Little Corner would turn, had instructed his secretariat to prepare a warrant for Uspensky’s arrest. After Stalin relented, Yezhov used Uspensky’s anxious ferocity in Orenburg to try to buttress his own standing.
In the first half of 1938, the NKVD “mass operations” were specially prolonged for the USSR’s two most strategic territories. The Soviet Far East, facing Japan, received the highest new quota; Ukraine, facing Nazi Germany, the second highest.134 Uspensky would send Moscow reams of reports about unmasked “plots,” besting the totals of all other regional NKVD chieftains.135 First, though, Yezhov went in person to Khrushchev’s and Uspensky’s new bailiwick to ratchet up the carnage. Just before departing for Kiev, on February 12, 1938, he had summoned several operatives. “Yezhov asked us, ‘Who here speaks Ukrainian?’” one participant, Grigory Kobyzev, testified. “It turned out that those present knew almost no Ukrainian. Yezhov asked, ‘How are we going to converse there in Ukraine?’ Frinovsky laughed and loudly said, ‘Over there, there is not a single Ukrainian, just Jew after Jew.’” Yezhov laughed as well. Kobyzev was named head of NKVD personnel in Ukraine and tasked with purging it of Jews. The spectacular ascent, as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, of people from the former Pale of Settlement was entering eclipse. “Oh, cadres, cadres, this is not Ukraine but a whole Birobijan,” Yezhov further remarked, once he and Kobyzev were on-site, alluding to the special Soviet Jewish enclave in the Far East.
Yezhov went down the list of all Ukraine NKVD personnel, marking those for arrest or demotion (to tasks such as Gulag duty).136 He also gave a speech lacerating the assembled NKVD men in Ukraine for allegedly having left large numbers of anti-Soviet elements at large. A cigarette dangled from his mouth the entire time he lectured; the scar on his face was starkly visible. “It was my first time at such a high-level gathering, and naturally I marveled at everything,” testified Mikhail Zhabokritsky, the Jewish NKVD chief of the Moldavian autonomous republic, in Ukraine, who would be arrested a few days later. “But what astonished me the most was Yezhov himself—not tall, even dwarfish, thin, frail. When he sat in the chair, from the table one could only see his head.” Although Yezhov was a general commissar of state security, equivalent to the rank of marshal, he dressed indifferently. “His self-confident pose, the independent tone of his speech, did not harmonize with his exterior and came across as ridiculous,” observed Zhabokritsky. At the farewell banquet in Kiev, Yezhov got so drunk that his bodyguards had to carry him out in front of everyone.137 “This year was a special one for the Soviet country,” Khrushchev would summarize to the Ukrainian Communists at their next party congress, praising the mass arrests while adding that “after the trip to Ukraine by Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, and the arrival of comrade Uspensky in the Ukrainian SSR NKVD, a real rout of enemy nests began.”138