A friend sends this along...
Yow. That IS remarkable, innit? (Y)Ezhov is a relatively obscure Rooshian, but here's what The Wiki sez about him, in part:
Yow. That IS remarkable, innit? (Y)Ezhov is a relatively obscure Rooshian, but here's what The Wiki sez about him, in part:Yezhov was known as a determined loyalist of Joseph Stalin, and 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 Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26, 1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda. 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 also conducted a thorough purge of the security organs, both NKVD and GRU, removing and shooting many officials who had been appointed by his predecessors Yagoda and Menzhinsky, but even his own appointees as well. He maintained that it was worth having ten innocent people suffer rather than letting one spy get away. (Miscellaneous links removed)Well, Dang! The similarity doesn't end with appearances, does it?
Maybe Yezhov was born in Kenya? Or there's cloning afoot!
ReplyDeleteA rather uncanny resemblance, indeed, both in appearance and politics.
ReplyDeleteIn 1968 Robert Conquest (now at the Hoover Institute) published his ground-breaking work: "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties"
ReplyDeletein which he notes that the Russian term for the "great terror, or great "purge" of the 30s along with the show-trials of 1938 of that period was "The Great Yezhovchina,"
named after our guy Yezhov.
They say everybody has a double....just our luck...not only a physical but an ideological soul-mate.
The physical likeness is interesting, and I know you post this just because it is uncanny, but it kind of aids the conspiracy theorists. I roll my eyes every time I hear some one liken Obama to the anti-Christ, which is more common around here in the Bible Belt than comparing O to Yezhov. Of course, I remember when folks thought the anti-Christ was Kissinger. Some thought it was Reagan. Could be, there is more than one anti-Christ.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the similarities in appearance AND politics/methods is astounding, innit? While Obama isn't physically liquidating anyone... yet... he HAS thrown a whole helluva lot of folks under the metaphorical bus.
ReplyDeleteLou: I'm SO with you on the Anti-Christ thing.
Virgil: Thanks for the illumination on Yezhov.
That attitude toward political opposition is pretty standard across progessive/fascist/socialist/communist philosophy. They all offer similar modes of thought, because they all come from the same roots.
ReplyDelete