“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
This statement by Primo Levi is probably the best explanation of how dictatorships work.
Consider this story from 1937, an old Russian tailor had been busily sewing all day and his hands were tired. Rather than lay down his needle where it might be lost, he stuck it into a newspaper that had been pinned to the wall by his table.
He never noticed that he happened to stick it into the eye of a picture of a Communist Party official. A customer standing nearby did and informed the authorities. Within days, the tailor and his family were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for “terrorism”.
Then there was the housewife who was also jailed simply because some pieces of soap she had purchased fell on to a newspaper picture of Stalin.
This was life in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s Great Purge of the Thirties, when the paranoid dictator ruthlessly rooted out those he feared were working to overthrow him.
It was a time when the most innocent act, such as those of the tailor and the housewife, could have the secret police dragging off citizens to rigged trials, hefty prison sentences and often execution.
At the center of all this persecution of the innocent was the coldly smiling figure of Nikolai Yezhov, a 5ft tall cripple who was nicknamed Karlik (the Poisoned Dwarf). He was head of the secret police from 1936 to 1938, second in power only to Stalin himself. It was during Yezhov’s reign of terror that millions of arrests, imprisonments, deportations and executions took place.
Pictured: An unidentified general, Molotov, Stalin, and Yezhov
Most of today’s #HistoryClass is referenced from Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov’s Stalin’s Iron Fist: The Times And Life OF NI Yezhov. The other source is Grover Furr’s Interrogations of Nikolai Ezhov, former People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs.
Relatively little is known about Yezhov; even his place of birth – some records say St Petersburg while others claim Lithuania – is open to speculation. He was poorly educated, and his first jobs were those of a tailor’s assistant and a factory worker. He was then a soldier in the Tsarist army but joined to the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 Russian Revolution. He rose quickly through the communist system – largely due to his cold efficiency and quiet determination to succeed.
But it was really when he met Stalin in 1928 that his star rose. Yezhov made it clear that he was willing to do anything that was required of him. That included helping him with the brutal purging of opponents, real and imagined. Stalin was greatly impressed by Yezhov’s boundless enthusiasm and the long hours that he was willing to work.
By 1935 Yezhov, by now an intimate of Stalin’s, wrote a paper arguing that political opposition would eventually lead to violence and terrorism. It was this argument that formed the basis of Stalin’s purges.
Yezhov had his eyes on the prestigious and powerful job as head of the secret police (the NKVD). This post, one of the most powerful in the Soviet Union, was already occupied by Genrikh Yagoda, a loyal old Bolshevik who had taken part in the 1917 revolution. He, too, was a close friend of Stalin. But behind the scenes Yezhov worked hard to have Yagoda discredited.
Soon after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a rising star in the Communist Party whom Stalin believed to be a threat, Yagoda ordered the arrest of leading party members who were accused of being involved with Leon Trotsky in the plot to murder Stalin. However, Yezhov convinced Stalin that Yagoda had failed to obtain more evidence and in 1937 the old Bolshevik was put on trial and executed. Now firmly in place as head of the NKVD, Yezhov exercised unheard-of powers of brutality with Stalin’s blessing.
In these roles he perpetrated the grand excesses known as the Yezhovshchina, the cruel, ruthless elimination or repression of Stalin’s enemies or alleged enemies in the Great Purge. The liquidations gradually extended from the party leaders to the party and state apparatchik and finally to the general population.
By Yezhov’s reasoning, it was calculated that not only should a suspected political criminal be arrested but also all of his relatives – including wives and children above the age of 12. Targets had been laid down on Yezhov’s orders with the result that in some areas innocent adult males were rounded up for mass arrest and almost certain death. One emigré later recalled: “Almost all the male inhabitants of the little community where I lived in the lower Ukraine had been arrested.” Another reported that the secret police took all males between the ages of 17 and 70 from his village.
By the summer of 1938, however, Yezhov himself had become the object of Stalin’s suspicions. His fatal mistake was to show disrespect for some of the dictator’s closest associates – in particular by infuriating the powerful and sinister Vyacheslav Molotov, a right-hand man of Stalin’s in the Politburo, the party’s supreme ruling body. Stalin demanded that Yezhov apologise in writing to Molotov but even that was too late and the police chief was dismissed in November 1938.
In December, Lavrenty Beria replaced him as head of the NKVD, and Yezhov was arrested in April 1939. During interrogation, Yezhov implicated dozens of his family members and personal acquaintances for supposed counterrevolutionary activities, and hundreds were killed in the ensuing purge. In February 1940 Yezhov became a victim of the trial process that he had helped create, and he was executed that month.
So, how does this affect us? Our president, Buhari was once a dictator. He is not one yet, but given that he has tasted that fruit before, he needs to be watched especially closely. I am worried by the functionaries around him who have, so early into his tenure, started singing his praises.
Dictators do not become dictators if there are no functionaries like Yezhov to cement their positions and carry out their orders. One of the thing about such functionaries is their unwavering devotion, and refusal to question anything about such a dictator. Consider Yezhov’s last words, just before he was shot: “I die with Stalin’s name on my lips.”
Leave a reply