Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s ‘Iron Fist’ by  J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, (Yale University Press, 2008).

Reviewed by Dr Martin McCauley

Getty and Naumov have spent years in the Russian archives delving into Stalin and his times. They must have spent as much time with Stalin as some of his subordinates!  My image of Stalin is close to the portrayal by Alex Petrenko in the recent BBC TV series on Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.  Cautious, perceptive, always suspicious of motive, slow of speech and movement, cruel, disrespectful of others but nevertheless a born leader who inspired great loyalty.  He was well-read and intelligent.  He was careful to surround himself with those who were less able than himself.  In this regard, Stalin acted as did many other leaders.  For instance, Tony Blair chose ministers who were intellectually inferior to himself.  As one of his associates once observed, Tony was not interested in argument.  He was interested only in winning an argument.  Stalin never indulged in debate for the sake of it.  He did not have a philosophical or intellectual turn of mind.  His discussions always had a practical outcome.  Molotov and others often argued with him over policy.  However, after 1930 they always deferred to him and, on occasions, Stalin changed his mind as a consequence of their points of view.

The authors are in their element here.  They underline the fact that institutions in the Soviet Union were weak and often overlapping.  Hence there was always institutional conflict.  The comrade who rose to the top was the one who could mediate conflicts, overcome bottlenecks and get things done.  Stalin could not stand intellectuals (he knew he was not their equal) and lazy, self-indulgent officials.  It is tempting to regard him as a ‘cog’ politician.  All he wanted from his subordinates was to implement his grand design.  What was his grand design?  To make the Soviet Union invincible and himself as the master of all he surveyed.

Astute officials, such as Yzhov, never told Stalin what to do.  They only submitted advice about possible courses of action.  Stalin did not and could not decide everything.  He only took the key decisions.  Other questions were delegated to his team.  This afforded them considerable power as they acted like little Stalins in their own bailiwick.  Often Stalin wrote to Yezhov or Molotov asking what was to be done.  As a ‘cog’ politician, cadres were of supreme importance.  Bolsheviks regarded themselves as insiders.  All those who criticized or opposed them were outsiders.  The latter were to be eliminated either administratively or by using force. It was an ‘us’ and ‘them’ universe.

Stalin fashioned a bureaucracy which accorded with his priorities.  Old Bolsheviks (party members before 1917) were a thorn in the flesh as they belonged to a different Bolshevik tradition.  They disliked administration because they were members of the ‘heroic’ generation.  They believed they had the right to debate party policy.  As such, they were a threat to a ‘cog’ functioning system.

This book is about Yezhov on the make.  It ends as he is nominated to take over from Genrikh Yagoda as head of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD).  As such it supersedes all other studies of the subject.  Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov’s book on Yezhov, published in 2002, is good but it lacks the archival access the present authors had.
The authors set out to examine three questions.  The first concerns the role of Nikolai Yezhov.  Was he simply Stalin’s obedient lap-dog?  Just what power did he have and how did he use this power?

The usual answer to the first question is that Stalin chose Yezhov because he was willing to do anything the dictator wanted.  The authors argue that ‘everyone from bottom to top had some measure of power and acted with some measure of obedience’ (p. 208).  Everyone tried to maximize his power and protect himself and his friends within his sphere of competence.

Yezhov was not an ‘independent politician’ (p. 209).  He did not make grand policy.  However, policy can be made while implementing decisions taken by others.  Top politicians—Yezhov was probably the second most important politician, apart from Stalin, in 1936—enjoyed the power of patronage and were masters in their own bureaucratic houses.  Stalin delegated huge responsibilities to his lieutenants and held them accountable for the results.  As such, they exercised great authority and room for manoeuvre in achieving their tasks.

Information played a crucial role.  Those who brought problems to Stalin’s attention had their own agenda and filtered out other material.  Personnel policy was of primary importance.  Officials suggested a comrade for a post, but Stalin sometimes rejected the nomination and chose someone else.  Generally top officials chose their own staff, engaged in stab-in-the-back politics, argued over budgets and attempted to expand their area of competence.  When a conflict could not be resolved, Stalin acted as referee.

The problem is that we do not know what details of policy Stalin kept for himself.  Hence we cannot assess the autonomy of members of his team.  Who could be arrested only on the orders of Stalin and who on Yezhov’s orders?  We don’t know.

Yezhov had regular personal contact with Stalin, and they conducted a voluminous correspondence.  Yezhov was always obsequious and understood how to influence the vozhd.  He did not tell Stalin everything.  It is interesting that at his fall, in 1938, Stalin accused him of not informing him about the contents of his ‘secret archive’.  The archive was replete with names of officials he had not arrested and was therefore protecting.

The second set of questions examined concern his career path.  How did he climb the ladder of power?  There is the view that Stalin groomed Yezhov for his role as NKVD chief and implementer of the terror.  The authors argue that the view that Stalin planned the terror in advance is ‘contradicted by a substantial body of evidence’ (p. 212).  They think that a more plausible explanation is that the erratic policy changes of 1936 reveal ‘indecision, false starts, contradictions, and short-term improvisation’ as Stalin’s modus operandi (p. 212).

The authors regard Yezhov’s meteoric rise through the bureaucracy as nothing unusual.  There are many parallels: Andrei Zhdanov, Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and many others.  Talent was in short supply, and those who proved themselves capable of achieving results rose quickly.  Yezhov had mastered the Bolshevik rules of the game.  In 1935-36 he set out to undermine Yagoda and secure the top job in the NKVD.

One of the reasons why Yezhov was promoted was that he was a hard, conscientious worker.  Indeed, he had to be forced to take vacations.  He came across as a modest comrade, a trait which Stalin admired.  He lived with his wife Antonia in a small apartment.  This was in stark contrast to Yagoda.  After his arrest, an inventory was made of his possessions.  It turned out that he had used state funds to build himself a palatial dacha.  In 1936 alone he spent over a million roubles of state funds to house his family and relatives in apartments, dachas and rest homes.  Stalin was quite unaware of all this.  When he found out, he was furious and drafted a Politburo resolution laying down the maximum size of dachas.  This remained in operation until the Gorbachev years.

Yagoda lived in some style.  He possessed, among other things, 42 pairs of boots, 25 men’s overcoats, 130 pairs of silk stockings, 37 pairs of foreign made gloves, 95 bottles of French perfume, 1,008 antique dishes and 73 foreign made fishing rods.  There were also over a thousand pornographic pictures and 11 pornographic films.  Did he buy these or did he simply confiscate them from fellow collectors?!

Yezhov, at the pinnacle of his influence, possessed only one overcoat, 9 pairs of old boots, 48 simple shirts and a whole array of empty and partially empty vodka bottles.  He was usually dressed in a rough shirt and trousers.  His boots were the worse for wear and had never seen any polish.

He practised an unsophisticated air.  For Dmitry Shepilov he was a ‘totally ignorant man’ (p. 216). Shepilov fancied himself as a refined person and had the reputation of being the only comrade in the leadership who knew the difference between an opera and an operetta.  Yezhov had tried to recruit Shepilov as an NKVD agent, but he turned him down and lived to tell the tale.  Shepilov describes Yezhov’s unkempt hair, yellowish teeth and partially shaved face.  He is, after all, hardly an impartial witness!

Yezhov worked in the Putilov factory in Petrograd before the revolution.  He became a Red Guard and was a Civil War commissar (but never saw front-line action).  This was the ideal background for an aspiring Bolshevik apparatchik.  He acquitted himself well in what are now the Mari autonomous republic and Kazakhstan.  In these two regions ethnic Russians were in the minority.  He then worked in the Central Committee (CC) apparatus specializing in cadres.  There were few Bolsheviks in the countryside.  In order to push through collectivization Stalin set up the USSR People’s Commissariat of Agriculture.  Yezhov became the deputy commissar and selected personnel.  He stayed a year and then moved upwards into the CC industrial department.  Hence he was experienced in nationality policy, agriculture and industry.

When Stalin was looking for a new head of the NKVD in 1936 Yezhov, the authors posit, was the natural candidate because of his unparalleled knowledge of party and government cadres throughout the country.  When he became head of police he brought with him his ‘tail’, a retinue of trusted subordinates.

The third question examined is about the world view of Yezhov and other members of Stalin’s team.  How could they have committed the crimes they did?  Did they believe in the fabrications they fashioned to send many to their deaths?

One answer is to argue that Yezhov’s personality changed in the late 1930s.  He passed from being a friendly, approachable fellow into a monster under Stalin’s malevolent influence.  Evil corrupted good.

Yezhov did not think that he was evil.  He thought he was fighting evil.  His work would ensure a happy future for his country.  In his last statement before his execution in 1940, he describes an all-embracing, proto-fascist plot to overturn socialism in the Soviet Union.  There were oppositionists literally everywhere.  He thought his own dismissal had been engineered by as yet undiscovered conspirators.  It was his fault that he had not purged enough personnel.

The authors trace the concept of the ‘them’ and ‘us’ universe to pre-revolutionary Bolshevik culture.  The Civil War provided a precedent for the vicious cruelty of the late 1930s.  It was either exterminate or be exterminated.  The authors claim that for Yezhov true freedom consisted ‘of silencing the voices of those who opposed the struggles of workers, soldiers and peasants’ (p. 223).  One also heard the view that it was only ‘the ill-will of evil doers that obstruct change’.  All problems were caused by ‘ill-intentioned people, by enemies of the people’ (p. 224).  Workers were building a happy community, and all those who opposed this concept had to be destroyed for the greater good of all.

The authors conclude that there was no conflict in Yezhov’s mind between the humanity and community of his Bolshevik milieu and the savage cruelty of his workplace.  They think that the Yezhov of the 1920s and the 1930s was one and the same person.

Another way of understanding Yezhov’s behaviour is to draw an analogy from the world of finance.  How does one locate the origins of the present financial meltdown?  One explanation, advanced by Niall Ferguson, in his Ascent of Money, is to think of the ‘herd instinct’.  If one animal starts a stampede, the others follow.  They do not stop to think but act instinctively. Yezhov was caught up in the oppositionist ‘herd instinct’ of the late 1930s.  It was not inevitable.  The frenzy gathered momentum only in 1937 and 1938.  But then it suddenly stopped.  Wisely the authors do not attempt a rational explanation of the Great Terror.

Besides a scholarly, nuanced treatment of Yezhov’s career, the authors provide, in my view, the best analysis of the evolution of the Bolshevik bureaucratic system.  It will surprise some readers to learn that it was only in 1925 that the Politburo and Orgburo were capable of locating and reviewing past decisions.  Until then they had no filing system!  It was only in the late 1920s that the centre learned the composition of all party committees throughout the land.