Stalin made a famous remark to Nikolai Yezhov:

Stalin instructed Yezhov, " See for yourself, but Tukhachevsky should be forced to tell everything ...

Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1907.

His successor and former deputy Yezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and beat him for added humiliation just before his execution.

Destruction of the old bolshevik cadres as well as Yagoda himself — all potential or imagined enemies of Stalin – was not a problem for Yezhov.

Ordered by Stalin to create a suitably grandiose plot for Yagoda's show trial, Yezhov ordered the NKVD to sprinkle mercury on the curtains of his office so that the physical evidence could be collected and used to support the charge that Yagoda was a German spy, sent to assassinate Yezhov and Stalin with poison and restore capitalism.

As a final insult for his former mentor, Yezhov ordered Yagoda to be stripped naked and severely beaten by the guards at the Lubyanka before being dragged into the execution chamber and shot.

Under Yezhov, the Great Purge reached its height during 1937 – 1938, with 50-75 % of the members of the Supreme Soviet and officers of the Soviet military being stripped of their positions and imprisoned, exiled to the Siberian gulags or executed, along with a greater number of ordinary Soviet citizens, accused ( usually on flimsy or nonexistent evidence ) of disloyalty or " wrecking " by local Chekist troikas in order to satisfy Stalin and Yezhov's arbitrary quotas for arrests and executions.

On a stage crowded with flowers, Anastas Mikoyan, dressed in a dark caucasian tunic and belt, praised Yezhov for his tireless work.

Yezhov was appointed to the post of People's Commissar for Water Transport on April 6, 1938.

By charging him with the extra job, Stalin killed two birds with one stone: Yezhov could correct the water transportation situation with tough Chekist methods, and his transfer to the terra incognita of economic tasks would leave him less time for the NKVD and weaken his position there, thus creating the possibility that in due course he could be removed from the leadership of the punitive apparatus and replaced by fresh people.

Yezhov had accomplished Stalin's intended task for the Great Purge: the public liquidation of the last of his Old Bolshevik political rivals and the elimination of any possibility of " disloyal elements " or " fifth columnists " within the Soviet military and government prior to the onset of war with Germany.

From Stalin's perspective, Yezhov ( like Yagoda ) had served his purpose but had seen too much and wielded too much power for Stalin to allow him to live.

In an ironic twist of fate, it would be Yezhov who would eventually fall in the struggle for power, and Beria who would become the new NKVD chief.

Stalin's penchant for periodically executing and replacing his primary lieutenants was well known to Yezhov, as he had previously been the man most directly responsible for orchestrating such actions.

On November 19, his wife Evgenia committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills ; she was particularly vulnerable because of her many lovers, and people close to her were being arrested for months ( Yezhov had told her on September 18 that he wanted a divorce, and she had begun writing increasingly despairing letters to Stalin, none of which were answered ).

At his own request, Yezhov was officially relieved of his post as the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs on November 25, succeeded by Beria, who had been in complete control of the NKVD since the departure of Yezhov ’ s deputy Frinovskii on 8 September ( Frinovskii was appointed People ’ s Commissar of the Navy ).

Stalin was evidently content to ignore Yezhov for several months, finally ordering Beria to denounce him at the annual Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Yezhov, like his predecessor Yagoda, mournfully maintained to the end his love for Stalin.

An immediate appeal for clemency was declined, and Yezhov became hysterical and behaved in a cowardly fashion, weeping.

This was further reinforced by Stalin's decision to declare damnatio memoriae on Yezhov, a fate normally reserved for only the highest-ranking and most prominent of Stalin's political enemies, and all evidence of his existence was quietly censored from State records and publications.

Though his daughter Natalia Khayutina has fought for a revision of the case, Yezhov has not been rehabilitated ( the Procuracy decided that because of the serious consequences of Yezhov ’ s activity as NKVD chief and the casualties he inflicted upon the country, he was not subject to rehabilitation, and the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court concurred on June 4, 1998 ).

The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and " excesses " during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov.

Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda trying to assassinate him.

Yezhov was known as a devout Bolshevik and loyalist of Joseph Stalin, and in 1935 he wrote a paper on Stalinism in which he argued that since political unorthodoxy was impossible in a perfect Communist state ( such as the USSR ), any form of political opposition to Stalinist policies was actually evidence of conspiracy by " disloyal elements " to overthrow the Soviet state, thus requiring violence and state terrorism to " root out " these " enemies of the People "; this became in part the ideological basis of the purges.

Liushkov to Japan on June 13, 1938, rightly worried Yezhov, who had protected him from the purges and feared he would be blamed.

Uspensky, disappeared after being warned by Yezhov that he was in trouble ; Stalin suspected that Yezhov was involved in the disappearance, and told Beria, not Yezhov, that Uspensky must be caught ( he was arrested on April 14, 1939 ).

NKVD Order No. 00485 called " On the liquidation of the Polish diversionist and espionage groups and POW units " was approved on August 9, 1937 by the Party's Central Committee Politburo, and was signed by Nikolai Yezhov on August 11, 1937.

NKVD Order № 00485 " On liquidation of Polish sabotage and espionage groups and units of POW ( Polish Military Organization, Polska Organizacja Wojskowa ) " (" О ликвидации польских диверсионно-шпионских групп и организаций ПОВ ") approved on August 9, 1937 by the VKP ( b ) Central Committee Politburo and signed by Nikolai Yezhov, the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs on August 11, 1937 laid the foundation for systematic repressions of ethnic Poles in 1937 and 1938.

NKVD Order № 00439, signed by Nikolai Yezhov on July 25, 1937, was the basis for the German operation of the NKVD in 1937 – 1938.

It was at this time that Soviet agents assassinated the former chief of the Soviet intelligence service in Western Europe, Ignace Reiss ; It was later revealed that the Soviet NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov spent 300, 000 French francs to accomplish the wet business.

The majority of the Central Committee members elected at the 17th Party Congress were killed during, or shortly after, the Great Purge when Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria headed the NKVD Grigory Kaminsky, at a Central Committee meeting, spoke against the Great Purge, and shortly after was arrested and killed.

A new version of the film was published in 1938, including a longer sequence to reflect Stalin's " achievements " at the end of the film and leaving out footage with " enemies " of that time, including figures like Nikolai Yezhov, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Dimitrov and others.

* 1940 – Nikolai Yezhov, Soviet secret police official ( b. 1895 )

It was part of the Great Purge, conducted by Nikolai Yezhov after the NKVD Order no.

With few rich or middle-class peasants left to arrest, to satisfy the conviction quotas demanded by Stalin and Yezhov the NKVD terrorized more of the peasantry to induce more denunciations.

Although Beria's name is closely identified with the Great Purge because of his activities while deputy head of the NKVD, his leadership of the organisation marked an easing of the repression begun under Yezhov.

File: Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin, with Nikolai Yezhov. jpg | Original: Nikolai Yezhov at Stalin ’ s left.

File: The Commissar Vanishes 2. jpg | Censored: Yezhov deleted from Stalin ’ s left.

It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov.

Until the reorganization begun by Nikolai Yezhov with a purge of the regional political police in the autumn of 1936 and formalized by a May 1939 directive of the All-Union NKVD by which all appointments to the local political police were controlled from the center, there was frequent tension between centralized control of local units and the collusion of those units with local and regional party elements, frequently resulting in the thwarting of Moscow's plans.

The purges were carried out by Stalin's successive police chiefs, Nikolai Yezhov was the chief organiser and Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich and Molotov were intimately involved in the processes.

In Russian historiography the period of the most intense purge, 1937 – 1938, is called Yezhovshchina (; literally, the Yezhov regime ), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD.

The Great Purge was started under the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, but the height of the campaigns occurred while the NKVD was headed by Nikolai Yezhov, from September 1936 to August 1938, hence the name Yezhovshchina.

This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Yezhov were present.

It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov.

" Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter.

In 1938 he was one of the key figures in bringing about the downfall of Yezhov, the head of the NKVD.

The article was illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD archivists.

Yezhov was gradually relieved of power.