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Menzhinsky died of what Europeans still call taedium vitae. In his case, that meant that the dirty books, the torture chambers, even the high cultural mission had ceased to interest him.
Menzhinsky's pupil and successor was Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda, a dull-faced man with a Chaplin mustache under whose regime developed the idea of putting prisoners to work. Even children arrested for "stealing Socialist property" were put into labor camps. The writer Maxim Gorky, a great admirer of Yagoda, glorified "this policy of education by teaching the truths of Socialism. . , ." Gorky added: "People whose historical duty it was to kill some beings in order to free others are martyrs. . . ." Two years later, Yagoda was accused, among other things, of having poisoned Gorky, and condemned to death.
He was succeeded by a shrieking little man named Nikolai Yezhov, who wanted to get back at the world for the years he had spent in bitter poverty. He began his reign by purging the ranks of the NKVD, successor to the OGPU. Next he purged Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and practically the entire High Command of the Red Army. He gave his name to two of the Red Terror's maddest years (1936-38), the "Yezhovshchina." In the Yezhovshchina, the most fantastic denunciations were accepted at face value by the NKVD; no one was safe. Terror was completely indiscriminate, torture equal to anything that went on in Nazi concentration camps. The papers referred to Yezhov almost as lyrically as to Stalin: "Our hero, our father, who destroyed the vipers' nests."
After two years, Stalin called a hait. Yezhov disappeared. Some think he is still in an insane asylum. In 1938, with war threatening in Europe, began the reign of Lavrenty Beria.
At Last, Sanity. It was no accident that Beria's four predecessors were, to say the least, neurotics. But Beria seems to be a sane, well-balanced man. In that fact lies the deepening horror of Russia. For Beria, without shrieks or dark yearnings, plods along, like the efficient bureaucrat he is, in the bloody footsteps of Dzerzhinsky. Some time ago a former Communist explained: "The task of the Soviet government is to create a new man with a new 'morale,' according to which it will be as easy to kill on the party's orders as to drink a glass of water." Beria, who was under 20 when the revolution broke, is that "new man."
Pro-Communists have spent years and millions telling the world that the "excesses" of the Soviet regime were to be accounted the inevitable evils of a violent transition. For such a period, fanatics like Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov were inevitable choices as wielders of the purifying pistol. The transition, however, obviously ends in