A combination of two old posts of mine:
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During the so-called Yezhovshchina, when Khrushchev complained to Stalin about the NKVD trying to manufacture a case against him, Stalin shrugged and said, "They're gathering evidence against me, too." Sheila Fitzpatrick, *On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics,* p. 134.
https://books.google.com/books?id=HAIACQAAQBAJ&pg=PA134 That response may seem disingenuous, but Stalin may actually have been telling the truth:
"Among the papers confiscated during Ezhov's arrest in April 1939, there was indeed a pre-1917 correspondence of thirty-five pages of the Tiflis gendarme with respect to the search for 'Koba' (i.e., Stalin) and other members of the Transcaucasian RSDRP organization. Later, the correspondence could not be found in Ezhov’s file; Beriia was rumored to have kept it.61 In Ezhov’s papers, however, the authors came across a dozen notices of the Turukhansk post office relating to remittances and parcels received by I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin), when he was exiled there in 1913–15. 62 About Ezhov’s intentions, one can only speculate. Could he have collected evidence in order to prove, if necessary, that Stalin had been an Okhrana agent? Or there could be a quite simple explanation, that is, that he collected evidence on Stalin's prerevolutionary activity for a museum of the leader, for he was a specialist in this field and in 1935–36 had directed the organization of the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow.63 It is not to be ruled out, however, that during the period of Stalin's cooling off toward him, since the summer of 1938, Ezhov was no longer completely loyal and was quietly collecting strength and evidence against Stalin." Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, *Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940,*, p. 176.
https://books.google.com/books?id=3IcnAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA176
Now most historians do not believe that the young Stalin was an Okhrana agent, and neither do I. But this forum is after all concerned with *alternate* history. So let's say that Stalin *had* been an Okhrana agent, that Yezhov found absolutely conclusive documentary proof of it, and that he sent it abroad with orders to make it public if anything should happen to him--and then informed Stalin of what he had done...
When I said "absolutely conclusive" I meant that they can be proven *not* a forgery. Now you may say that news of them can be suppressed in the USSR. True enough (in the sense that even people who learn about them will have to pretend they don't exist). But, still, Stalin will have to ask himself: Is shooting Yezhov really worth the damage the revelations would do to Stalin's reputation outside the USSR?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ainst-me-too-yezhov-blackmails-stalin.368470/
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To those posts, I would just like to add that with regard to other things, Yezhov's blackmail ability would be less--even if we assume that Stalin cares that much about the effects on his reputation outside the USSR. Yezhov "exposes" that Stalin was behind the purges?! The Soviet press was constantly emphasizing that it was Comrade Stalin who had taken the lead in uncovering the "wreckers." If you're expecting some cynical document where Stalin says, "I know these men are innocent but let's make up a case against them and punish them anyway" I am pretty sure that no such document exists.
Or the shooting of Kirov? I doubt very much that Stalin was behind it
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/why-was-jfk-assassinated.444126/page-2#post-17049579 but if he was we can be quite sure that he did not leave a paper in the archives saying "Dear Comrade Yagoda: See to it that Kirov is killed. I. V. Stalin"
Or the 1933 famine? No doubt all the documents Yezhov can get his hands on will blame it on "kulak sabotage." It would have been suicide for any Soviet official to put in writing that it was Stalin's fault.