Yezhov personally participating, the prisoners were tortured in order to make them “confess” to crimes they had not committed; the use of torture had the approval of Stalin and the Politburo.
In April 1937, Yezhov was included in the leading five who in practice had taken over the leading role from the Politburo, and in October of that same year he was made a Politburo candidate member. In April 1938, the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Water Transportation was added to his functions. But in fact, it was the beginning of his decline. In August, Stalin appointed Lavrenty Beria as his deputy and intended successor. After sharp criticism, on November 23, 1938, Yezhov resigned from his function as NKVD chief, though for the time being he stayed on as People’s Commissar of
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Water Transportation. People close to him were arrested, and under these conditions his wife, Yevge-nia, committed suicide; Yezhov abandoned himself to even more drinking than he was accustomed to.
On April 10, 1939, he was arrested. He could not bear torture and during interrogation confessed everything: spying, wrecking, conspiring, terrorism, and sodomy (apparently, he had maintained frequent homosexual contacts). On February 2, 1940, he was tried behind closed doors and sentenced to death, to be shot the following night.
His fall was given almost no publicity, and during the ensuing months and years he was practically forgotten. Only since the 1990s have details about his life, death, and activities become known. In spite of this, during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s, he was brought up as nearly the only person responsible for the terror; the term Yezhovshchina, or the time of Yezhov, was brought into use. Some historians of the Stalin period indeed tend to stress Yezhov’s personal contribution to the terror, relating his dismissal to his over-zealousness. As a matter of fact, Stalin suspected him of disloyal conduct and of collecting evidence against prominent party people, including even Stalin himself. Others believe that he obediently executed Stalin’s instructions, and that Stalin dismissed him when he thought it expedient. See also: GULAG; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-SARIONOVICH; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. London: Hutchinson. Getty, J. Arch, and Naumov, Oleg V. (1999). The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, tr. Benjamin Sher. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jansen, Marc, and Petrov, Nikita. (2002). Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Khlevnyuk, Oleg (1995). “The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937-1938.” In Soviet History, 1917-53: Essays in Honour of R.W. Davies, ed. Julian Cooper et al. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, rev. and expanded ed., tr. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press. Starkov, Boris A. (1993). “Narkom Ezhov.” In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and
Roberta T. Manning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
YUDENICH, NIKOLAI NIKOLAYEVICH
(1862-1933), general in the Imperial Russian Army, hero of World War I, and anti-Bolshevik leader.
Of noble birth, Nikolai Yudenich began his glittering military career upon graduating, with first-class marks, from the General Staff Academy in 1887. He served on the General Staff in Poland and Turkestan until 1902, participated in the Russo-Japanese War (earning a gold sword for bravery), worked as deputy chief of staff from 1907, and became chief of staff of Russian forces in the Caucasus in 1913. During World War I, Yudenich distinguished himself as Russia’s most consistently successful general, inflicting numerous defeats upon Turkey, notably at Sarikamish (December 1914) and, in August 1915, repulsing Enver Pasha’s invasion in 1915, and in capturing Erzurum, Tre-bizond, and Erzincan (February-July 1916). He consequently figured prominently in Russian wartime propaganda. With the overthrow of the Romanovs in February 1917, Yudenich regained overall command of the Caucasus Front. However, dismayed by the revolution and reluctant to cooperate with the Provisional Government, he was retired from active service in May. He returned to Petrograd and lived underground for a year after the October Revolution, before fleeing to Finland. Thereafter he headed anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region, as commander-in-chief of the Northwest Army. Like other White leaders, Yudenich failed to establish an effective political regime or to attract sufficient support from the Allies, and suffered strained relations with the non-Russian peoples of his base territory. Nevertheless, he masterminded the Whites’ advance to the outskirts of Petrograd in the autumn of 1919. However, Trotsky pushed his forces back into Estonia, where they were interned before being disbanded in 1920. Yudenich was briefly arrested by the Estonian government, but was allowed to settle into exile in France. He largely shunned ?migr? politics until his death, in Saint-Laurent-du-Var. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY; WORLD WAR I
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Mawdsley, Evan. (2000). The Russian Civil War. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was proclaimed on December 1, 1918, and was renamed Yugoslavia on October 3, 1929 by Alexander Karad-jordjevic. The creation of the new enlarged South Slav state and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia together ruptured the once-strong bonds between Russia and the South Slav lands, especially Serbia. Marshal Josip Broz Tito defied Stalin and introduced his own brand of communism in Yugoslavia. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
Russian support for Serbia in the summer of 1914 had helped precipitate World War I, which destroyed the Romanov dynasty and eventually brought the Bolsheviks to power. Like its neighbors, the new Yugoslav state was fiercely anticommunist. In 1920 and 1921 the kingdom joined Romania and Czechoslovakia in a series of bilateral pacts that came to be known as the Little Entente. The alliance was primarily aimed at thwarting Hungarian irreden-tism (one country’s claim to territories ruled or governed by others based on ethnic, cultural, or historic ties), since the former kingdom of Hungary had lost approximately 70 percent of its prewar territory. The Little Entente also served as part of France’s eastern security system designed to contain both Germany and Bolshevik Russia. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, relations between Moscow and Belgrade were but a shadow of that which had preceded World War I. Not only was Yugoslavia a supporter of the postwar settlements that had aggrandized its territory, but it also sought to isolate the Bolshevik revolution; moreover, it had little trade with the new Soviet state, in part because prewar relations between St. Petersburg and Belgrade had been based almost entirely on diplomatic and cultural rather than economic links. In addition, the rise of Nazi Germany left much of Yugoslav trade within the Third Reich’s orbit.
In 1941 Germany occupied Yugoslavia. Two groups, the Chetniks, led by Dra a Mihailovic, and the Partisans, under Josip Broz Tito, a Moscow-trained communist, fought the Germans and at the same time vied for supremacy within Yugoslavia. Although Tito emerged victorious and Stalin’s so-called Percentages Agreement with Winston Churchill gave Moscow 50 percent influence in Yugoslavia, the Red Army had not occupied the country, and thus the Soviet Union was unable to influence developments there as it could in other areas of central and southeastern Europe. Tito’s popularity and mass following stood in contrast to the situation in the other countries of the future “bloc,” where there were at best small native communist parties dominated by the Soviet Union.
As a result, the communist state created in Yugoslavia in 1946 was independent of Soviet stewardship even though its constitution was initially modeled on the Soviet constitution. From the outset, Tito pursued an independent domestic policy and an aggressive foreign one. His ambitions threatened both Stalin’s leadership (by his promotion of national communist movements) and also peace in Europe (by such actions as the shooting down of American planes during the Trieste Affair, the Italian-Yugoslav border dispute, and his support for the communists in the Greek Civil War). When Tito attempted to create a separate customs
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