Nikolai Yezhov, Russian police officer and politician (born 1895)

Nikolai Yezhov

NKVD director under Joseph Stalin (1895–1940)

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of…