Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895–1939)

Soviet politician and party functionary. As head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) 1936–38, he was a major figure in Stalin's ruthless purges of the Communist Party. The bloody suppression of all dissent in this period came to be known after him, as the ‘Yezhovshchina’, but he himself was arrested in 1938–39 and never seen again.

Yezhov emerged from obscurity in 1934 to become chairman of the Commission of Party Control, the party's internal intelligence service, whose express task it was to discover and eliminate opponents of Stalin. He was dismissed in 1938 soon after becoming a member of the Politburo, and was succeeded as police chief by Lavrenti Beriya.