Stalin and His Hangmen

How the Hedgehog Got Its Prickles

. . . the lion that is the most amenable to the circus trainer’s tricks is the one with the lowest social standing in the pride, the omega animal.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

IN HIS PARTY DOCUMENTS it is repeatedly stated that Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov was born in St. Petersburg on May 1, 1895, that he started work as an apprentice metalworker at the Putilov works in Petersburg in 1906, and was called up by the army in 1913.¹ Ezhov once wrote that he had had only two years’ elementary schooling and had taught himself to read and write. In the 1920s he read so much that he acquired the sobriquet of “Nick the Bookman” (Kol’ka-knizhnik). He was thus literate by the modest standards of Stalin’s Politburo.

Under arrest in 1939, Ezhov said his father, Ivan, was an army bandsman in Lithuania and later ran a Petersburg teahouse of ill repute. ² When Ezhov filled in his party card, he claimed to know some Polish and Lithuanian. Evdokia Babulina-Ezhova, in her sole contribution to our knowledge of her infamous brother, recalled spending holidays in the Suwałki-Mariampol region on the Polish–Lithuanian border. Ezhov’s mother, Anna, was a bandleader’s maid. Ethnically Russian, she had lived in Lithuania.

Possibly, Ezhov was born in 1892 in Suwałki; the only Ivan Ezhov listed in the St. Petersburg directory for 1895 ran a public house. Certainly, Ezhov was wise to invent a wholly Russian and wholly proletarian origin for his career under Stalin. When he took over the NKVD from Iagoda, citizens hoped that a genuine Russian worker would mitigate the fanaticism of the Russophobe Poles and Jews who had run the Cheka and OGPU.

The Nikolai Ezhov of the 1920s is recalled as a considerate, friendly lad. Bukharin’s and Orjonikidze’s widows insisted that their husbands’ executioner was a good man fallen into bad company, a helpless marionette in the hands of a master puppeteer: “You don’t blame the rope for hanging you,” another survivor said. But Ezhov in his forties was Hyde to his younger Jekyll—an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts against his drinking companions, a voracious sexual predator, an active and a passive bisexual, seducing any woman or underage girl he came across— with not a drop of sentiment, loyalty, or remorse.

We know even less of Ezhov’s first twenty years than we do of Iagoda’s or Menzhinsky’s. Whereas their initiation into mass killing came in the bloodiness of the civil war and revolutionary terror, Ezhov cannot be blamed for many deaths until Stalin in 1936 put him in charge of a machine that slaughtered hundreds of thousands. No doubt Ezhov’s service in the Tsar’s army scarred him deeply, and at the height of his brief reign of terror he still liked to sing, with deep feeling and beautiful intonation, the traditional song of the fatally wounded soldier:

Black raven, black raven,

Why do you spread your talons out

Over my head?

Fly home to my land,

Give this bloodstained cloth

To my young wife.

Tell her she is free . . .

Ezhov, like Iagoda, owed his promotion to talents as a bureaucrat; his revolutionary honors, like Iagoda’s, were minor. He was, it seems, an agitator at the steelworks and later the artillery repair shop where he worked. When revolution came to Vitebsk in Belorussia, with its Russian, Jewish, and Polish populations, Ezhov joined the Red Guard and the Communist Party and helped disarm by bluff a large Polish corps on its way to fight the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.³

From 1919, when Ezhov joined the Red Army, the facts are verifiable. Barely five feet tall and unfit for the front, Ezhov was sent to a radio-telegraphic school in Saratov on the Volga. He became secretary of the garrison Communist Party in Saratov, brushed up his thick auburn hair and wore built-up heels to add to his height. From Saratov, as the Whites approached, Ezhov’s school retreated up the Volga to the Tatar city of Kazan. Despite a reprimand for recruiting deserters into the school, he was promoted, and then in 1921 put in charge of party propaganda in central Kazan. Here Ezhov had to reconcile, under Lenin’s cosmetic multinationalism, the national aspirations of the Tatars with the Muscovite orientation of the Russians.

The latter half of 1921 is a blank in Ezhov’s record. He may have taken part with Malenkov in the Red Army’s suppression of an uprising in Bukhara in October 1921, which would account for his closeness to Malenkov in the mid-1930s. Certainly Ezhov was ill; all his life he had a hacking cough and feverish bouts followed by spells of treatment for tuberculosis. In Kazan Ezhov married Antonina Titova. Like Ezhov’s mother and adopted daughter, she miraculously survived him. She is not known ever to have spoken of her husband. The daughter of a village tailor, she was studying science at Kazan University when the revolution disrupted classes; she found secretarial work in the party. Small but muscular after working in a foundry, Nikolai Ezhov was an appealing suitor. For eight years they seemed a normal couple.

The Kazan party recommended Ezhov to Moscow from where he was sent to Ioshkar-Ola (then Krasnokokshaisk) in the Mari republic on the north Volga, where half the population was Mari, a Finnic people. Ezhov was to allay ethnic tensions. He arrived in March 1922, when the Mari held key appointments in the party and better-educated Russian communists seethed with resentment. The local party boss Ivan Petrov contemptuously called Ezhov in Mari Izi Miklai (Little Nick). Ezhov responded with techniques that later made him formidable: he created a secretariat, staffed with his own men, to usurp Petrov’s power; he reported to Moscow on the “ideological mess” of Petrov’s party organization, uncovered fraud and called in from Moscow a commission to deal with the Mari. Ezhov then raised the stakes: he appointed his wife, Antonina, to manage the party organization and attacked Petrov and Mari “nationalists”: “Petrov has to be reigned in. I enclose documents.” The conflict ended with both Petrov and Ezhov given indefinite leave, but his appeals to Moscow had introduced Ezhov to men of power around Stalin, and Kaganovich had Petrov deported. ⁴ Kaganovich and Ezhov had worked together before the Petrov affair. Kaganovich met Ezhov in 1917 in Vitebsk, where the former was rabble-rousing at the railway workshops. The boyish Ezhov, to Kaganovich’s amazement, was the Vitebsk station commissar.

Ezhov was moved in 1923—by Kalinin, Rykov, and three of Stalin’s satraps, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev, and Andreev—to another ethnic hornet’s nest: Semipalatinsk, then a city in the vast Kazakh-Kirgiz republic. Ezhov, at most thirty years old, became the party chief of a province ravaged by starving Turkic nomads, bandits, and deserters. He coped, and was moved to Orenburg, then capital of Kazakh-Kirgizia; by 1926 he was a senior party official and a delegate to the fourteenth congress of the All-Union party. The Kazakhstan archaeologist and writer Iuri Dombrovsky, who survived several spells in the camps, liked Ezhov. “Many of my contemporaries, especially party members, came across him personally or through their work. There wasn’t a single one who had anything bad to say about him. He was a responsive, humane, soft, tactful person. He would always try to sort out any unpleasant personal problem privately, to put the brakes on things.” Another Kazakhstan party secretary, back from the GULAG, recalled that Ezhov “sang folk songs with feeling.”

At the end of 1925, at the party congress in Moscow, Ezhov stayed in a hotel with Ivan Mikhailovich Moskvin. As he was at daggers drawn with Zinoviev, Moskvin was the sole member of Leningrad’s administration whom Stalin promoted—to running the party’s organization and distribution section, headhunting administrators. Moskvin took to Ezhov as a fellow Leningrader. Ezhov wanted a Moscow posting, for Antonina had resumed her studies there in 1926, and in February 1927 Ezhov joined Moskvin’s section, where he amazed even the ascetic Moskvin by meeting every deadline and by his appetite for paperwork. After seven months, Ezhov became Moskvin’s deputy and almost an adopted son in the Moskvin family: Moskvin’s wife, Sofia, called him “sparrow.” Cuckoo would have been more appropriate, for ten years later Ivan and Sofia Moskvin would be shot, Ivan as a freemason, Sofia for no specific reason, on Ezhov’s orders. Moskvin’s son-in-law the writer Lev Razgon recalls Ezhov in 1927: “not at all like a vampire, he was a thin little man, always dressed in a cheap crumpled suit and a blue satin tunic. He would sit at the table, quiet, taciturn, a little shy, he drank little, did not interrupt, just listened, his head slightly inclined.” What Moskvin told Lev Razgon about Ezhov was clairvoyant: “I don’t know a more ideal worker, or rather executive. If you entrust him with anything you need not check up, you can be sure: he will do it all. Ezhov has only one fault, admittedly a fundamental one: he doesn’t know when to stop. . . . And sometimes one has to keep an eye on him in order to stop him in time.”

Ezhov was a real talent. The Tatar party secretary, a Russian Jew, asked for Ezhov as “a tough lad . . . to sort out the Tatars.” Kaganovich picked Ezhov to help in the collectivization campaign of autumn 1929 when 25,000 party members were mobilized to intimidate the peasantry; as deputy commissar for agriculture, Ezhov was among the most intimidating. Antonina, absorbed in her research into sugar beets, saw less and less of her husband. Ezhov, his temper frayed by overwork, looked elsewhere for consolation. The Ezhovs were nevertheless observed together in 1930 in Sukhum by Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam; they were all staying, courtesy of Nestor Lakoba, at a villa near the Black Sea. Ezhov was to sanction Mandelstam’s last and fatal arrest; his widow would find it hard to believe that this “modest and rather pleasant man” who had given them lifts to town in his car and who danced with a limp, had become the organizer of Stalin’s holocaust. In Sukhum the Mandelstams heard of Mayakovsky’s suicide, an event that reawakened Mandelstam’s lyric inspiration. Russian party officials went on dancing; Georgian guests remarked that they would never dance on the day their national poet had died. Nadezhda Mandelstam relayed this to Ezhov, who promptly stopped the party.⁵ Ezhov played billiards with Lakoba, he danced, he sang—with perfect pitch and great feeling—he let his wife take Abkhaz peasant children for rides in his car, he obligingly took back with him to Moscow zoo a bear cub that Lakoba had been given. The amiable Antonina lounged in a deck chair, and Ezhov cut roses for more responsive women.

The previous year, at a sanatorium in Sochi, Ezhov had met a woman any man working for Stalin should have avoided like the plague. Evgenia Feigenberg was not just Jewish and twice married; her present husband, Aleksei Gladun, a Moscow editor, had lived in America until 1920, and the couple had worked in the London embassy in 1927. Evgenia was only a typist but she had literary connections that fascinated Nick the Bookman: she had been and would be again Isaak Babel’s mistress. Gladun later testified: “He was hopelessly infatuated with her and wouldn’t leave her room. . . . My wife explained to me that Ezhov was a rising star and that it was to her advantage to be with him, not me. . . .” The Ezhovs divorced and Nikolai married Evgenia in 1931. The divorce saved Antonina’s life—she died at the age of ninety-one—but not Gladun’s. Evgenia became editor of The USSR on the Building Site, and in Moscow the new couple moved to Strastnoi (Passion) Boulevard.

In November 1930 Ezhov got Moskvin’s job and was for the first time closeted with Stalin. In autumn 1932 he had six such meetings; by 1933 they were occurring at roughly fortnightly intervals. Stalin directed Ezhov “to take a special interest in strengthening and increasing the personnel of OGPU’s regional apparatus as part of the drive to consolidate collective farms and drive out the kulaks.”⁶ By then Ezhov ran the commission for purging the party, organizing checks on documents and past records, which threw out nearly half a million members or one eighth of the party. He combined many functions in the party’s Orgburo, supervising OGPU and heavy industry, and placing party cadres. The more Stalin railed at old Bolsheviks for their “arrogance as grandees who have grown too big for their boots,” the more he promoted younger acolytes whose indebtedness to him compensated for their lack of Bolshevik credentials.

By the early 1930s Stalin was expressing avuncular concern for the young protégé. He called Ezhov Ezhevichka (little blackberry). Lavrenti Beria, taking Stalin’s cue, called Ezhov Iozhik (little hedgehog). In August 1934 Ezhov’s health worsened. Stalin sent him first to Berlin, then to an Austrian spa for treatment. The Austrian doctors diagnosed a stomach disease and Stalin had Kaganovich send them a telegram asking them “to refrain from operating on Ezhov unless there is an urgent need to.” ⁷ Stalin telegraphed the Soviet embassy in Berlin: “I ask you very much to pay attention to Ezhov: he is seriously ill, he underestimates the seriousness of his situation. Give him help and surround him with care. Bear in mind that he is a good man and a most valuable worker. I shall be grateful if you regularly inform the Central Committee of the progress of his treatment. Stalin.” Ezhov’s symptoms persisted, and in 1935 Stalin wrote to him, “You must take leave as soon as possible—to one of the spas in the USSR or abroad, as you wish, or as the doctors say. Go on leave as soon as possible, if you don’t want me to raise a scandal about it.” As a result the Politburo allowed Ezhov and Evgenia two months’ leave and 3,000 gold rubles for treatment abroad.⁸ Ezhov was treated, as were several of the Soviet elite, by Dr. Carl von Noorden, who had only recently fled from Germany to Vienna. Nobody else in Stalin’s circle, not even Molotov, caused Stalin so much concern as Ezhov.

After May 10, 1934, with Menzhinsky dead and Iagoda in sole charge of OGPU, Stalin considered it imperative to subordinate OGPU and then the NKVD to his own men. Kaganovich and Ezhov found fault with Iagoda’s every action and, worse, his every failure to act. Ezhov went behind Iagoda’s back to his underlings Iakov Agranov and Efim Evdokimov, and reported in withering terms to the Politburo on the state of the NKVD. Ezhov’s devastating reports doomed Iagoda. They ensured that within months Ezhov would move from overseeing the NKVD to full control, with a remit to purge it as no Soviet institution had yet been purged.