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.

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.

The construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal was also started under his watch but only completed after his fall by his successor Nikolai Yezhov.

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov () (; May 1, 1895 – February 4, 1940 ) was the senior figure in the NKVD ( the secret police of the Soviet Union ) under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge in the 1930s.

The Gulag population swelled by 685, 201 under Yezhov, nearly tripling in size in just two years, with at least 140, 000 of these prisoners ( and likely many more ) dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and the elements in the camps ( or during transport to them ).

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.

Petrov miraculously survived the purges of Stalin under Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria.

In 1938 Ivan Grave was arrested under the false accusation of participating in the " Military-Fascist Plot ," but was released in February 1939 after denunciation of " Yezhovshchina " ( the reign of the then NKVD chief Yezhov ) and during campaign against slander by Joseph Stalin's order as a particularly valuable specialist.

Tukhachevsky's interrogation and torture were directly supervised by NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov.

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, " A few days later, as Yezhov buzzed in and out of Stalin's office, a broken Marshal Tukhachevsky confessed that Yenukidze had recruited him in 1928, that he was a German agent in cahoots with Bukharin to seize power.

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.

As a devout Stalinist and not a member of the organs of state security, Yezhov was just the man Stalin needed to intensify the terror and rid Stalin of potential opponents.

" We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

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

Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out the Great Purge: the imprisonment or execution of millions of people throughout the Soviet Union as alleged " enemies of the people ".

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.

However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union it became clear that Stalin, Kaganovich, and Yezhov had actually concocted Tukhachevsky's " treason " themselves.

Stalin, Yezhov, and Marshall Voroshilov orchestrated the arrest and execution of thousands of Soviet military officers after Tukhachevsky was shot.

Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg, according to his official Soviet biography, though other records point to the possibility that he was born in Marijampolė.

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.

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.

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

On March 3, 1939 Yezhov was relieved of all his posts in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but retained his post as People ’ s Commissar of Water Transportation ( his last working day was April 9, at which time the " People ’ s Commissariat was simply abolished by splitting it into two, the People ’ s Commissariats of the River Fleet and the Sea Fleet, with two new People ’ s Commissars, Z. A.

On February 2, 1940, Yezhov was tried by the Military Collegium chaired by Soviet judge Vasili Ulrikh behind closed doors.

According to author Donald Rayfield, " Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war.

Before leaving Paris, Orlov left 2 letters for the Soviet Ambassador, one for Stalin and one for his henchman Yezhov.

NKVD Order № 00593, also known as NKVD Order about Harbinites ( приказ НКВД о харбинцах, (" Харбинский приказ ") by September 20, 1937, undersigned by Nikolai Yezhov regulated arrest and prosecution of former personnel of the China Far East Railway ( KVZhD ) lived in Harbin and reemigrated into the Soviet Union after 1935, when the KVZhD was sold to Manzhouguo.

For instance, the events surrounding the falls of Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentii Beria are given in considerable detail, as are the events in the Soviet Union leading up to World War II, and Joseph Stalin's reaction to the outbreak of the war.

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.

" Yezhov may well have also realized the danger he was in from such a lavish display of independent public praise ; Stalin was always deeply suspicious of the public popularity and political ambitions of his immediate subordinates, and he was present at the event, observing the scene " silently and without expression " from his private box.

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.

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.

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 ).

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

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.

Yezhov was shot later that night in an execution chamber that had been built according to Yezhov's own specifications near the Lubianka headquarters.

Just before the execution, Yezhov was ordered to undress himself and then was brutally beaten by guards at the order of Beria, the new NKVD Chief, just as Yezhov had ordered the guards to beat and humiliate his predecessor Yagoda before his execution only two years before.

Yezhov had to be carried into the execution chamber semi-conscious, hiccupping and weeping uncontrollably.

Viktor Suvorov claims that Serov had a responsibility in the deposition and execution of Nikolai Yezhov.

Viewed from the broader context of the Great Terror which followed, the execution of the most popular and well-regarded generals in the Red Army command can be seen as a preemptive move by Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, People's Commissar of State Security, to eliminate a potential rival and source of opposition to their planned purge of the nomenklatura.

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.