The Brutal Execution of Nikolai Yezhov *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

What if the man who built the killing machine was forced to kneel in the same basement he designed and the bullet that ended him came from the very system he perfected? February 4th, 1940. A small trembling figure stands in a cold Moscow cellar. He is 44 years old. His name is Nikolai Ivanovich Yhjov.

Just 2 years earlier, this man signed the death warrants of nearly 700,000 people. He watched marshals of the Red Army beg for mercy. He personally supervised torture sessions that left blood on his own jacket. Now the guards are holding him up because his legs will not work. The future chairman of the KGB raises a pistol.

One shot to the back of the head. The body is cremated within hours. The ashes are dumped into a common pit at Donskoy Cemetery. No marker, no funeral, no tears. That is not a Hollywood script. That is history. And the most terrifying part, the man who ordered hundreds of thousands of executions died screaming, weeping, and begging for the same mercy he never gave.

If you are ready for the darkest chapter of Stalin’s terror, the true story of the bloody dwarf, then you are in the right place. This is Untold War Story. Before we go any further, hit that like button, subscribe, and turn on the notification bell right now. We dig up the forgotten, the erased, and the truly shocking stories from the bloodiest conflicts and regimes in history.

Your support keeps these buried truths alive. Do it now because what you are about to hear will stay with you. Let’s begin. The 1930s. The Soviet Union is a vast prison without walls. Joseph Stalin has clawed his way to absolute power, but he is haunted by ghosts. The old Bolsheviks who once fought beside Lenin still breathe.

Some of them whisper doubts. An investigation claims a secret network is working against him. In Stalin’s mind, anyone who ever shook Lenin’s hand is a potential traitor. The solution is simple and monstrous. Erase them all. He launches what history would call the Great Purge. It begins with party members and Red Army officers.

Then it swallows peasants, teachers, engineers, poets, and entire national groups. By 1938, the killing has become so industrial that it is wrecking the Soviet economy and gutting the armed forces. The man Stalin chooses to run this slaughterhouse is the head of the NKVD, the secret police that arrests, tortures, and executes on command.

His name is Nikolai Yhof. Nikolai Ivanovich Yhof entered the world on May 1st 1895 in St. Petersburg, then the glittering capital of the Russian Empire. His mother was a Lithuanian maid. His father bounced between jobs, musician, forest warden, even manager of a brothel. Young Nikolai received only a few years of elementary schooling before he was shoved into the working world as a Taylor’s assistant and factory hand.

He stood just 5t tall, 151 cm, a fact that would later earn him one of the most chilling nicknames in history. In 1915, the Imperial Russian Army conscripted him. He was wounded in battle. Two years later, in May 1917, 6 months before the October Revolution, he joined the Boleviks. During the Russian Civil War, he fought with the Red Army.

When the guns finally fell silent in 1922, Yzoff slipped into the political machinery. Throughout the 1920s, he served as secretary of various regional Communist Party committees. Colleagues noticed one thing above all, his fanatical work ethic. He never seemed to sleep. By 1930, he was sitting in on pilot bureau meetings, the innermost circle of Soviet power.

His first marriage to a minor party clerk named Antonia Tova ended in late 1930. He married Yavanya Figenberg, a glamorous Jewish woman 9 years younger. They adopted a little girl named Natasha from an orphanage. To outsiders, Yhjav looked almost harmless. One contemporary described a small, slender man in a wrinkled cheap suit and blue satin blouse, sitting quietly, slightly shy, drinking little, head bowed, mostly listening.

That quiet exterior hid something far darker. The famous bolevik Nikolai Bukarin once compared Yhjov’s childlike smile and twisted sense of humor to cruel little boys who set cats on fire just to watch them burn. Yhjov lived hard. He drank heavily. He suffered from muscle weakness, anemia, and chronic skin infections. The combination of overwork, nerves, and poor health pushed him into deep depression and exhaustion.

Yet Stalin saw something useful in the little man. In 1934, Yhjov was elected to the central committee. The next year, he became one of its secretaries. Stalin loved his loyalty and his results. In August 1935, the dictator wrote to him, “When you say something, you always do it.” Stalin even gave him an affectionate nickname, “My little blackberry.

” When Yhjov’s health collapsed, Stalin sent him to central Europe for expensive treatment and ordered the Berlin embassy, “Pay very close attention to Yhjov. He is seriously ill. He is a good man and a very precious worker.” Stalin did not keep Yhov close out of friendship alone. He needed a man willing to destroy anyone the leader pointed at.

The turning point came on December 1st, 1934 when Sergey Kiraov, the popular Lennengrad party boss, was assassinated. Although the killer acted alone, Stalin seized the murder as a golden excuse. He handed Yhof the job of turning the crime into a vast conspiracy. Yhof immediately began fabricating cases against old Bolevik rivals Lev Kanef and Gregori Zenovv.

Within hours of Kiraov’s death, he was directing the CHVD to arrest names from Stalin’s personal lists. He worked at first with the then head of the NKVD, Genrich Yagod. Together, they built the first of the infamous Moscow show trials in August 1936. The evidence was pure invention. Yhjov’s men used sleep deprivation, extreme heat, and threats against families until the broken prisoners signed confessions.

Despite promises that their lives would be spared, Zenovv, Kamv, and their associates were shot. Yagod kept the spent bullets as souvenirs. Yagot’s days were already numbered. Stalin had grown disgusted with him and once threatened to punch him in the nose. In September 1936, Yhof replaced Yagod as people’s commisar for internal affairs.

His first assignment was to destroy his predecessor. Yhof accused Yagod of trying to poison him with mercury sprinkled in his office and of murdering the writer Maxim Gori. It is said Yhof personally took part in Yagot’s torture. Yagod was only the first of many. The Red Army came next. On Stalin’s orders, Yzhoff arrested almost the entire Soviet high command.

Among them was Marshall Mikail Tukvsky, one of the most brilliant military minds of the age and an old rival of Stalin from the Civil War. Yzovv personally oversaw the Marshall’s interrogation. Under savage torture, Tukachevsky confessed to being a German fascist agent, plotting with Bkarin to overthrow Stalin. A special military tribunal sentenced him to death.

Yuzzoff watched as Tukvky was shot in the back of the head. Immediately afterward, he reported to Stalin, who demanded to know the marshall’s last words. Yuzzoff answered coldly. The snake said he was dedicated to the motherland and comrade Stalin. He asked for clemency, but it was obvious he was not being straight. The numbers are almost impossible to absorb.

Yzovv’s NKVD executed three of the five Soviet marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 core commanders, and every single one of the 17 army commasars. The officer core that would soon face Hitler was gutted before the first German tank rolled. Yzov did not pretend the terror was precise. He embraced its randomness.

He once declared, “There will be some innocent victims in this fight against fascist agents.” Better that 10 innocent people suffer than one spy escapes. When you chop wood, chips fly. On July 30th, 1937, he presented the pilot bureau with order number 00447. It authorized mass executions and deportations of former kulocks, criminals, and other antis-siet elements. Quotas were set by region.

Local MKVD chiefs who failed to meet their killing numbers risked becoming victims themselves. Within months, the order alone produced roughly 387,000 executions. 2 weeks later, Yzoff signed order number 00485, launching the systematic destruction of the Polish minority inside the Soviet Union.

Official records show 139,835 people caught in the Polish operation. 111,091 of them were shot. Similar national operations targeted Germans, Latvians, Koreans, and others. Yehjav did not merely sign papers. He supervised interrogations and executions. When Nikita Kruef once visited his office and noticed blood stains on the floor and on Yhov’s jacket, the little commasar shrugged and said, “One can be proud of those stains.

This is the blood of the enemies of the revolution. Prisoners were beaten so savagely that their eyes were knocked from their sockets. The deaths were quietly recorded as heart attacks. Yzoff even designed a special execution chamber with a sloping concrete floor that drained blood toward a log wall that absorbed bullets, complete with hoses for quick cleanup.

It functioned like an industrial slaughterhouse. The people gave him the name that stuck forever, the bloody dwarf. While the sellers ran red, Yhjav and his family lived in luxury. They occupied a spacious daca with a private cinema, tennis court, and household staff. He taught little Natasha to ride a bicycle and by all accounts treated her with genuine tenderness.

The same hands that signed death lists also steadied a child’s first wobbling pedals. In 1937 and 1938 alone, more than 1.3 million people were arrested. Approximately 682,000 were executed for crimes against the state. The Gulog population exploded by nearly 685,000 prisoners. At least 140,000 of them died from starvation, disease, and exhaustion inside the camps.

The period became known simply as the Yhjof Sheena, the time of Yof. Then, as suddenly as he had risen, the ground vanished beneath him. With the old Boleviks dead or broken, and the army decapitated, Stalin no longer needed his little Blackberry. Yhjov made a fatal mistake. He began to boast. On more than one occasion, he claimed the pilot bureau was in his hands.

In April 1938, Stalin promoted him to people’s commasar for water transport. A clear demotion. Two months later, the KVD chief in the Far East, Genrich Leushkov, defected to Japan. Stalin concluded that Yzov had lost control. In August 1938, Levanti Beria was appointed Yhjov’s deputy. By autumn, Yhjov’s closest colleagues were disappearing into the same prisons they once ruled.

Terrified, Yhjov sank into depression and heavy drinking. He asked his wife for a divorce, hoping to shield her. Yenia, compromised by her own circle of lovers and the arrests of people around her, wrote desperate letters to Stalin. She also wrote to her husband begging for poison and asking him to send a pre-arranged signal, a small dwarf statueette, when her arrest was imminent.

In November 1938, the signal arrived. Yenia swallowed a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. That same month, Barriia officially replaced Yzovv as head of the Encovid. Former friends crossed the street to avoid him. He stopped working, drank himself into oblivion, and retreated into his Kremlin apartment. In April 1939, the knock finally came.

Yhof was arrested, tortured with the same methods he had perfected, and forced to confess to a grotesque list of crimes: incompetence, theft of state funds, spying for Germany, and sexual devian. On February 2nd, 1940, he stood before the military collegium of the Supreme Court, the same body that had condemned so many at his command.

He denied being a spy or a conspirator. He insisted his earlier confession had been beaten out of him. He declared that he preferred death to telling lies, yet he still proclaimed his love for Stalin. Half an hour after being returned to his cell, he was brought back and told he had been sentenced to death.

Yzoff went pale, nearly collapsed, and had to be held up by guards. His plea for clemency was rejected on the spot. He became hysterical, weeping and screaming as he was dragged away. Two days later on February 4th, 1940 in a basement on Varsenovski Lane, the sentence was carried out. Future KGB chairman Ivan Saraf fired the shot. Yhof was 44.

His body was cremated immediately. The ashes joined the anonymous dead at Donskoy Cemetery. For years, the Soviet state simply erased him. Photographs were airbrushed. Official records went silent. As late as 1948, Time magazine still speculated he might be alive in an asylum. Little Natasha was stripped of the Yhjoff name and returned to an orphanage.

To this day, neither the Soviet nor the Russian state has rehabilitated Nikolai Yhof. In Russia, he remains the face of the great terror, the willing instrument who turned Stalin’s paranoia into an assembly line of death. There were no tears for the bloody dwarf. The machine he built simply rolled over him and kept moving. That is the story of Nikolai Yzovv, the man who made the great purge possible and then became one of its final victims.

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