Spent the day vaguely puzzled by J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov's new biography of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD between Yagoda and Beria. The book dutifully goes through the archives to flesh out the little chap's career. He was five feet tall. Like Stalin, another shorty, Yezhov was an expert in personnel questions- HR as we call it nowadays. Rigging appointments was his thing; I've met a few Yezhov's in my time. In line with much academic stuff, the book sets up a straw man- the idea that Yezhov was 'a robot' obediently carrying out his master's wishes to kill people. No, claim the authors', in every successive post he had more or less limited 'agency' and scope to fulfil his own ambitions. Well, I'd never have guessed. This is supposed to get us out of the 'dead end' of seeing Yezhov as 'evil' or as a product of a 'totalitarian' system. Now I've read enough Soviet history to know that not a single proponent of either of these latter views would claim that Yezhov was a robot- they just don't think his limited scope for independent action is important enough to warrant a 200 page book. The authors' also want readers to empathise with Yezhov's world view, of 'us' and 'them', which they claim derives from an older peasant mentality just as much as from Bolshevik Manicheaism. They even trot out the line that Yezhov lived modestly (like Stalin) in contrast to his sybaritic predecessor, with his 3,000 pornographic photos, and his rapist successor. Now I wonder how such a book would go down if it said much the same about Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann? Another thing it doesn't really get to grips with is that Yezhov killed tens of thousands of people solely by virtue of their nationality- beginning with around 40,000 ethnic Germans and going on to even larger numbers of Poles. In his two year rampage 1.5million people were arrested, of whom 700,000 were shot. Predictably the book mentions, but then doesn't discuss, the one thing that's revealing about 'Iron Fist'. Krushchev recalled that when he visited Yezhov in his NKVD HQ, the little chappie was inordinately proud of the blood stains spattered on his shirt from an interrogation he had just attended.