Search results for query: *

Yes - Yezhov himself. Granted, he said that in a confession in 1939 after his downfall & arrest, but for what it's worth Goloschyokin did manage to not get arrested & killed (unlike many other disgraced Old Bolsheviks) until after Yezhov fell from grace, even though he himself had lost Stalin's...

I agree: IIRC that was Yezhov who greeted, of all people, Nikita Khrushchev while drenched in the blood of someone he just tortured. Putting him in charge would be akin to making Andrei Chikatilo General Secretary - if he weren't a secret police chief, Yezhov did strike me as the kind of guy...

Re: Yezhov's temperament, I was going off memory of Simon Montefiore's Court of the Red Tsar and Nikita Petrov's Stalin's Loyal Executioner, which I had to read for my final paper in a 20th century Russian history course last semester. There's other articles on the interwebs for more information...

Nikolai Yezhov succeeds in eliminating Lavrentiy Beria in 1938 before the latter can appeal to Stalin, and thus remains the General Secretary's chief executioner for a while longer. Their relationship still deteriorates as Stalin considers the overly sadistic Yezhov a liability following the...