It reportedly took him roughly three minutes to send a man to his death… He began each working day by creating a new list of “enemies of the people” to eliminate. In this way, he deprived thousands of people of their lives. On 4 February 1940 (presumably!), Nikolai Yezhov, one of the cruellest perpetrators of Stalinist terror, was executed. He gradually achieved his strong position in the ranks of those loyal and devoted to Stalin, but he remained obedient and, most importantly, cruel. When he was appointed People’s Commissar (Minister) of the Interior (NKVD) in September 1936, he first bloodily cracked down on the men of his predecessor Genrikh Yagoda; then – between 1936 and 1938 – he became one of the main executors of the policy of mass terror in the USSR. It was he who issued the famous orders No. 00447 and 00448, which sparked the NKVD’s mass killing of so-called undesirable or anti-Soviet elements, and order No. 00485, which started the so-called anti-Polish operation. These orders resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including at least 111,000 Poles.

When Stalin decided that the terror could be curbed and he should distance himself from the crimes that he had, after all, ordered, he decided to tackle Yezhov. “The bloody dwarf” – as he was called – was executed after elaborate torture, but before he died he was to say: “Tell Stalin that I will die with his name on my lips.”

Photo: Gulag victims. A part of the permanent exhibition of the Sybir Memorial Museum