It was around the end of October that the first overt moves against Yezhov took place. Kaganovich and others persuaded Stalin to appoint a secret Commission of the Central Committee to report on the NKVD. Its members were Molotov, Beria, Vyshinsky, and Malenkov. It reported in mid-November, in terms hostile to Yezhov: two secret resolutions of the Central Committee criticized irregularities in investigative methods, and called for “recruiting honest people” to the security agencies. Over the next few weeks, several of Yezhov’s men were removed from their posts.82 Finally, on 8 December 1938, it was announced that his rule, at once pettifogging and bloodthirsty, had come to an end. He was replaced as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beria, retaining only his Commissariat of Water Transport.
For a time, Beria appeared together with Yezhov on the platforms and in the formal lists. Yezhov had by January dropped back to his former “correct” seniority in these lists, lowest of the candidate members of the Politburo (Khrushchev being absent in Kiev). He is last publicly mentioned on the presidium for the anniversary of Lenin’s death, on 22 January.83
Although not a delegate to the XVIIIth Party Congress, in March, he was present as a member of the outgoing Central Committee. And when the Congress’s “Senioren Konvent,” or informal Council of Elders, met to consider names for the new Central Committee, Yezhov’s went forward. There were no objections until Stalin said he thought him unsuitable, since he was involved in a plot with Frinovsky and others to use Stalin’s own bodyguard to assassinate him. Yezhov answered that it had been he who had exposed this plot. But Stalin retorted that this was only to cover himself; moreover, he had arrested many innocent people while protecting the guilty. Stalin ended by telling those present that in his opinion Yezhov was unfit to serve on the Central Committee, though it was, of course, up to them to decide.84
But Yezhov was only arrested in early April, at the Water Transport Commissariat, where he had chaired the Collegium but not taken part in the discussions, keeping silent or making paper airplanes. He is reported as confessing freely, and implicating others as required. He was charged with framing innocent people, with plotting to kill Stalin and seize power,85 and with being a British spy since the Civil War.86 But he was not shot until the following year.87 Frinovsky had remained Commissar for the Navy until removed and arrested in March. Otherwise, Yezhov’s leadership group in the NKVD had almost all been purged by the end of 1938. About 150 of his followers were shot.88
By March 1939, Beria’s men were everywhere in power; his own Georgian following held many of the major NKVD posts—in Moscow, Merkulov and Kobulov; in Leningrad, Goglidze; in the Maritime Province, Gvishiani; in Byelorussia, Tsanava.89 These were what was later to be characterized as the “Beria gang,” until they all fell together in 1953.
The appointment of Beria is usually taken as a convenient date to mark the end of the Great Purge. Of Beria!—that is, of a man whose name, even in official Soviet circles, is now the very embodiment of terror and torture. And yet there is some sense in the convention.
Yezhov’s removal was a simple piece of Stalinist expediency. The fact that most of his subordinates were executed under Beria was a simple matter of political mechanics. For apart from Yezhov himself and his personal nominees, the leading purgers, Stalin’s own agents, did not suffer. Shkiryatov, who had acted as Yezhov’s assistant, simply returned to Party work, and died, fully honored as Head of the Party Control Committee, a year after Stalin’s own death, in 1954. Mekhlis and Vyshinsky also survived into the 1950s. As for Malenkov, he flourished greatly in the years that followed, together with his rival Zhdanov.
In fact, throughout the Purge, Stalin had largely avoided public responsibility. And now, when the Terror had gone as far as it conceivably could, he could profitably sacrifice the man who had overtly carried out his secret orders, the man the Party and public then blamed most.
