So who was he anyway, this executor of the leader's schemes and designs? Really, there was nothing particularly unusual about him. He was a fairly colorless, mediocre individual who was raised up to the heights of party and state leadership by the will of Stalin, an ordinary product of the creation and establishment of a totalitarian, coercive, and bureaucratic system. He was truly a servant of the regime of personal power who compensated for his low moral and political qualities by exhibiting selfless love for, faith in, and devotion to the leader.

Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov was born into a working class family in 1895 in Petersburg. At the age of fourteen, he took his first job in the Putilov Works. During the First World War, he was drafted. After the February Revolution, he ran for a position on the regimental committee but was not elected. He deserted from the army with a group of soldiers soon afterwards and turned up in Petrograd in the spring of 1917.

The turbulent political life of the capital at that time literally overwhelmed all layers of society. Demonstrations and meetings at which representatives of various political parties and tendencies appeared were going on constantly. N. I. Ezhov took part in them very actively and, in May of 1917, joined the Bolshevik party. He participated in the October Revolution and enlisted in the Red Army in the beginning of 1918. As a military commissar, he took part in battles with parts of General Yudenich's Northwestern army near Petrograd.