Soviet Secret Police Chief. As Commissar of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) from 1936 to 1938, he directed the most savage phase of Josef Stalin's political purges, during which an estimated 2 million people were executed or sent to the Siberian gulag. Most were ordinary citizens falsely accused of crimes against the state. This period has gone down in Russian history as "Yezhovshchina" ("The Yezhov Era"). Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was born in St. Petersburg into a working class family. Invalided out of World War I military service, he joined the Communist Party in May 1917 and served with various Red Army units as a political commissar during the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921). After 1927 his skills in personnel administration found favor with Stalin and brought him swift promotion through the party ranks. The escalating purges of the 1930s were the outcome of Stalin's quest to eliminate potential rivals and maintain dictatorial control over the Soviet Union. The failure of his program for collectivization of agriculture (1930 to 1934) and the resulting famine in the Ukraine, combined with the rising threat from Hitler's Germany, had left his regime politically vulnerable. To prevent a possible coup, Stalin decided he had to dismantle Russia's existing Communist Party and replace it with a new one loyal only to him. This involved doing away with the remaining pre-revolutionary "Old Bolshevik" leaders, some of whom Stalin had outmaneuvered in the power struggle after Lenin's death. He began in earnest by establishing the Central Purge Commission (1933 to 1934) to expel over one million party members. Yezhov served on this board so efficiently he was elected to the party Central Committee in 1934, and named Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control in 1935. Although he was a bureaucrat rather than a secret policeman, Yezhov was tasked with implicating former opposition leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov, which NKVD Commissar Genrikh Yagoda had failed to do to Stalin's satisfaction. He personally interrogated Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 of their closest colleagues, forcing them to confess to a host of outrageous crimes that were aired in the first of the Moscow show trials in August 1936. All were condemned and shot. Whether or not Stalin ordered Kirov's killing (the evidence is inconclusive), he certainly used it as a pretext for the massive repressions that followed. Yezhov was far more willing than Yagoda to pander to Stalin's paranoid fantasies and on September 26, 1936 he was chosen to replace Yagoda as head of the NKVD. In January 1937 he was named People's Commissar for State Security, a newly created post that made him the second most powerful figure in the USSR. In this capacity he oversaw one of the 20th Century's bloodiest reigns of terror. At a glance Yezhov was the most unprepossessing of mass murderers. Barely five feet tall, with an elfin face and sheepish grin, he was described as genial and hardworking. Author Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband Osip died in the gulag, met Yezhov once and was surprised to find him "a modest and rather agreeable person". But in the late 1920s a high-ranking Soviet official noted that Yezhov's "only fault" was that "he doesn't know when to stop". He idolized Stalin and was morally pliable enough to take his orders to their extreme consequences. Coordinating the purges with his master in the Kremlin, he wrote, "We should shoot a pretty large number...Personally I think it must be done in order to finally finish with this filth". And in another missive: "We are launching a major attack on the Enemy. Let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly". During Yezhov's two years in power the inmate population of the gulag more than doubled. He oversaw the purges of 75% of the Supreme Soviet, including "Old Bolsheviks" Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov; 35,000 Red Army officers, among them the brilliant chief-of-staff Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky; and 14,000 members of the NKVD itself, beginning with his predecessor Yagoda. The madness soon spread to the general population, as Stalin and Yezhov fixed the number of "unreliables" at 5 percent and issued arbitrary quotas for arrests and executions. Scientists, farmers, artists, teachers, laborers - no sphere of Soviet society was unaffected. Their persecution was conducted clandestinely, most victims being dragged from their homes by the police in the dead of night, and with utter cynicism. A person could be charged with sabotage for being 10 minutes late for work and denunciations out of sheer malice were common; confessions were gained through torture and threats to family members. In Moscow people were shot at the rate of 700 a day, either in the cellars of the Lubyanka and Butyrka prisons or at the secret killing fields Yezhov set up at Butovo and Kommunarka. Thanks to the propaganda of Stalin's personality cult - which portrayed him as a godlike figure not far removed from the aloof old Czars - it was commonly believed Yezhov was waging the terror against the citizenry without the dictator's knowledge. Unbeknownst to the NKVD chief this was also part of his boss's agenda. He was widely publicized as "Stalin's Iron Fist" and "The punishing sword of the proletarian revolution" in dealing with threats to national security. Banners with Yezhov's portrait hung in Red Square, songs were written about him, cities and communal farms were named in his honor. In this way Stalin cunningly shifted the blame for the purges to his underling in the public consciousness. (Not all were duped: Isaac Babel, who knew the commissar and his wife Yevgenia, confided to Ilya Ehrenburg, "Yezhov is only the instrument"). When the last of the major "Old Bolsheviks" were dispatched at the third Moscow show trial in March 1938, Yezhov had served his purpose. What's more, the oppression was having a serious impact on the nation's infrastructure - politicos and professionals were being arrested faster than they could be replaced - and Stalin realized it would have to be scaled down. Yezhov, on the other hand, zealously pushed for even greater state terrorism. Steps were soon taken for his removal. In April 1938 Yezhov was given the additional post of People's Commissar for Water Transport with orders to overhaul its bureaucracy, leaving him little time for security matters. In his absence his trusted chief deputy Mikhail Frinovsky was suddenly transferred to the Navy Commissariat and replaced by Lavrenty Beria, who with Stalin's approval began to undermine Yezhov's authority at the NKVD. On November 11, when Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov issued a Politburo report criticizing the current state of the security organs, both Yezhov and his wife recognized that his downfall was imminent. Yevgenia committed suicide on November 19 and six days later Yezhov asked to be relieved as NKVD chief; he was succeeded by Beria. Sliding into alcoholism and despair, he ceased attending Politburo meetings in January 1939 and was kicked out of the Central Committee in March, though he remained nominal head of Water Transport. His last known photograph is a frightening portrait of a man unhinged. On April 10, 1939, Yezhov disappeared. References to him were removed from Soviet history books, his image was retouched out of official photographs. What became of him was a mystery for decades. It turned out he had been taken to the NKVD prison at Sukhanovo and put through the same horrors he had inflicted on so many. Under torture he confessed to treason, corruption, spying for the English, and other imaginary offenses. At his closed-door trial on February 3, 1940, Yezhov recanted his confession but took full responsibility for the purges, claiming, "My great guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few". He blamed political rivals for his fate, refusing to believe Stalin had used him as an expendable puppet. "Tell Stalin that I shall die with his name on my lips", he concluded. The following night Yezhov was shot in the basement of an NKVD station in Moscow. His body was cremated at the Donskoi Cemetery and the ashes dumped into an unmarked mass grave with those of thousands of his victims. Yezhov's horrid legacy was felt for the rest of Stalin's rule and beyond. The liquidation of Marshal Tukhachevsky and his officer corps left the Red Army poorly prepared for Hitler's 1941 invasion of the USSR, and many millions of Soviets would die before the Nazis were finally driven out. The expanded gulag system became an important part of the Soviet economy, with forced labor used to mine precious mineral resources. NKVD arrests and executions continued at a less dramatic pace under Beria, only to spike again after the war when returning Soviet POWs were imprisoned for disobeying Stalin's order to fight to the death. A planned second great purge was mercifully prevented by Stalin's death in March 1953. Unlike many prominent commissars unpersoned in the 1930s, Yezhov was never declared "illegally repressed" or "posthumously rehabilitated" by subsequent Soviet regimes. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s excoriated "the bloody dwarf" Yezhov for his role in the purges; it was then that the term "The Yezhov Era" gained currency. Anna Akhmatova helped introduce it to the West with her famous poem "Requiem", which opens with the line, "In the terrible years of the Yezhovshchina...". After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Yezhov's adopted daughter lobbied to clear his name, but his conviction on the blanket charge of crimes against the state was upheld by the Russian Supreme Court in 1998.