History's Dirtiest Secret: We Keep Cleaning It Up
In 1937, Nikolai Yezhov was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He was head of Stalin’s secret police, the dreaded NKVD, which was rebranded years later as the KGB. Most important, he was, at least for the moment, in Stalin’s good graces, a precarious place to be. As he well knew.Yezhov was everything Stephen Miller wants to be. He was the guy responsible for carrying out what became known as the Great Terror. His job was the systematic and ruthless elimination, often through summary execution, of anyone Stalin suspected might be an “enemy of the people.” This was a lengthy list, numbering in the many thousands, and from all reports Yezhov made a substantial dent in it.
That year, there was an official photo taken of Stalin, Yezhov, and two others walking along a canal in Moscow. (One of the others was Vyacheslav Molotov, whose notorious cocktails had not yet been introduced). A mere three years later, Yezhov was out of the picture, quite literally. He was himself arrested for no rational reason and promptly executed. That photo was famously altered — long before we could do it in PhotoShop — so that all trace of Yezhov was airbrushed out.
I only mention this because it wasn’t enough for Stalin to have Yezhov killed. He needed Yezhov to have never existed. Yezhov’s status was now something unique to the Soviet Union at the time: a “nonperson.”