Unleashing terror is like riding a tiger. It’s a wild ride and it’s easy to fall off and be consumed.
Stalin unleashed an essentially unlimited terror on the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. Nobody was safe, not the most dedicated old Bolshevik, not the dedicated foreign communists of the Comintern, and not the Red Army.
That kind of terror does tend to turn on the people who unleash it, as the French Revolution attests. I think that there was a realistic chance of that happening to Stalin, though it wasn’t as likely as the actual course of events.
Yezhov led the worst of the purges, and actually went far enough that by the summer of 1938 Stalin began to realize that the purge was starting to impair the ability of the Soviet Union to continue industrialization. Stalin decided to dial back on the purges a bit, and replace Yezhov.
Yezhov had been inside the process, so when Stalin brought in Beria as Yezhov’s deputy in August of 1938 and Beria started usurping Yezhov’s power with Stalin’s encouragement, Yezhov could see where the course of events was likely to lead. He was quite capable of moving through the cut-throat world of Purge-era Soviet politics, and was apparently even tapping Stalin’s phone at one point, but as his power was stripped away he collapsed into drunkenness and probably accelerated the process of his ouster by essentially walking away from his job, not showing up much of the time. He was eventually purged and later executed. Other than some drunken boasting about ousting Stalin, he never mounted any serious effort to protect his position against Beria and Stalin.
Human psychology is tricky. Here is a guy who knows he’s almost certain to be purged and executed unless he derails Beria and Stalin. He’s powerful. He’s cutthroat, utterly ruthless, capable of clawing his way to the top of the NKVD, and then leading the purge of the Red Army and much of the rest of the Soviet elite. And yet he collapses.
Let’s say he gets some cornered rat courage and some luck. He manages to take out Stalin and frames Beria, probably in September or October of 1938.
That’s not easy given Stalin’s paranoia, but Yezhov has a tough road ahead even once he carries it out. He is a candidate member of the Politburo but has no major source of power outside the NKVD and fear. He is hated by most of Soviet society, though also feared by it. What happens next?[FONT="]
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