The Water Commissar
This image taken by the Moscow canall was taken when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar. After he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and his image removed by the censors.Nikolai Yezhov
Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg and from 1915 to 1917, Yezhov served in the Tsarist Russian army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5, 1917, in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian civil war 1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army.
After February 1922, he worked in the political system rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control.
In 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism; this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges. He became People's Commisar for Afairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Centra Executivel Committee on September 26, 1936. Under Yezhov, the purges reached their height, with roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment being imprisoned or shot, along with hundreds of thousands of others, suspected of disloyalty or "wrecking" Yezhov himself fell out of Stalin's favour and on April 10, 1939, he was arrested and on February 4, 1940, he was executed
Lenin's speec
Leon Trotsky On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.
Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий) was a Ukrainian born Bolchevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo
He became an enemy of the State and was erased from Soviet history after leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth International , he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a Soviet agent who used an ice axe to fatally stab Trotsky. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskiyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.
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