execution, Beria reportedly gave Stalin a list of 346 of Yezhov’s as-
sociates to be executed. Fifty of them reportedly were Yezhov’s male
and female sexual partners.YEZHOVSHCHINA(THE TIME OF YEZHOV).Following Sergei
Kirov’s murder in December 1934, Joseph Stalininstituted a law
giving the NKVDpower to try and execute suspected terrorists with-
out recourse to defense lawyers or appeals. In 1936 Stalin made
Nikolai Yezhovhead of the NKVD, citing the security service’s lax
work in rooting out traitors. In 1936–1937 he urged Yezhov to begin
a massive purge of three suspected enemy elements: Poles and other
foreign communists; men and women arrested during the previous
decade; and suspected Trotskyitesand other dissidentswithin the
Communist Party. The initial planning called for the arrest of
250,000 men and women.
Yezhov and his immediate subordinates drove regional security
officers into a frenzy of arrests, torture, and execution. The
Yezhovshchinaseemed to take on a life of its own as the controlled
media called for greater vigilance and more arrests, and public de-
nunciations of innocent citizens filled the prisons. The NKVD fabri-
cated hundreds of thousands of cases, torturing millions into confes-
sions of spying for foreign states, planning terrorist acts, and
wrecking the Soviet economy. The guilty—there were few found in-
nocent—were tried and convicted, often after 15-minute trials. Exe-
cutions usually took place immediately following conviction.
There is no full accounting of the casualties, but statistics provided
to the Communist Party Central Committee by the KGBin the 1960s
indicate more than 1.5 million arrests and 750,000 executions in less
than 15 months. Five of 15 members of the ruling Politburo were shot,
as were 98 of 134 members of the Central Committee. The Komso-
mol was equally devastated, with over half its ruling central commit-
tee executed in 1937–1938. Arrests and executions in the provinces
claimed tens of thousands of party officials. In Byelorussia only three
of 100 senior Communist Party officials survived 1937–1938.
Arrests put almost a million men and women in the forced labor
camps, and recent research suggests that another 100,000 men and
women perished in the gulagin 1937–1938. In Leningrad approxi-
mately 40,000 were executed. In Moscow 21,000 were shot between294 •YEZHOVSHCHINA(THE TIME OF YEZHOV)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 294