Voices of History by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Author:Simon Sebag Montefiore [Montefiore, Simon Sebag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Nikolai Yezhov, “Shoot me quietly,” 3 February 1940

Stalin’s poison dwarf prepares to die. Yezhov was the diminutive Communist official and NKVD (secret police) boss who won Stalin’s patronage by his brutal competence, fanatical paranoia and personal devotion to the witch hunt, arrest, torture and killing of around a million innocent victims, many of them Bolshevik leaders. But by 1938, Yezhov was daring to execute personal enemies and gathering evidence against Stalin himself and other leaders. He was falling apart under the pressure, drinking heavily, indulging in sexual escapades with men and women, and worrying about his declining favor with Stalin. Lavrenti Beria, a Georgian, was brought in as his deputy then successor and he was fired, then arrested and tried secretly. Knowing he is about to be executed, he reads this extraordinary confession to the court, intended to display his eternal devotion to Stalin and Party. Soon after this he was executed.

For a long time I have thought about what it will feel like to go to trial, how I should behave at the trial, and I have come to the conclusion that the only way I could hang on to life is by telling everything honestly and truthfully. Only yesterday, in a conversation with me, Beria said to me: “Don’t assume that you will necessarily be executed. If you will confess and tell everything honestly, your life will be spared.” After this conversation with Beria I decided: it is better to die, it is better to leave this earth as an honorable man and to tell nothing but the truth at the trial. At the preliminary investigation I said that I was not a spy, that I was not a terrorist, but they didn’t believe me and beat me up horribly. During the twenty-five years of my party work I have fought honorably against enemies and have exterminated them. I have committed crimes for which I might well be executed. I will talk about them later. But I have not committed and am innocent of the crimes which have been imputed to me by the prosecution in its bill of indictment…

I did not organize any conspiracy against the party and the government. On the contrary, I used everything at my disposal to expose conspiracies…

One may wonder why I would repeatedly place the question of the Cheka’s sloppy work before Stalin if I was a part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy…

Coming from the NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs], I found myself at first alone. I didn’t have an assistant. At first, I acquainted myself with the work, and only then did I begin my work by crushing the Polish spies who had infiltrated all departments of the organs of the Cheka. Soviet intelligence was in their hands. In this way, I, “a Polish spy,” began my work by crushing Polish spies. After crushing the Polish spies, I immediately set out to purge the group of turncoats. That’s how I began my work for the NKVD. I personally exposed Molchanov

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