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All
the cards come with bioghraphies. Like this one.
Jevgenija
Jezjova
(1904-1938)
The skinny, mercurial Jevgenija Jezjova was born as Jevgenija
Feigenberg in Gomel. She seem to have had two interests in
life: sex and literature and before she met Nikolaj Jezjov
1930 she had already been married twice. Upon meeting Jevgenija,
Jezjov divorced his first wife and married her within months.
They never had any children, but adopted a young girl from
an orphanage.
Jevgenija was by far the most glamorous and independent of
the women in the Party elite and for a while even Stalin found
her fascinating. She was a spectacular dresser and loved literature.
And artists of all kind. Among others writer Isak Babel, director
Sergeij Eisenstein and jazz musician Leonid Utiosov wound
up among her trophies.
It seems as if her husband was aware of her amoral life just
as she was aware of his, but that they somehow both looked
the other way. There where rows, though, And once they fought
in public. During this ultra-paranoid period a lot of people
cracked under the stain or got ill both physically and mentally.
But while most of people faced their daemons quietly not to
attract any attention the Jezjovs were acting out in public.
An exceptionally strange anecdote has Jevgenija and Jezjov
together seducing their way through a theatre company while
taking turns denouncing each other's lovers and sending them
off to certain death. True or not, the story hints at how
shocking Jevgenija energetic love life must have been to the
average Party official (who, after all, is the one telling
the story). Despite the Bolshevik nod at free sexuality and
equality between the sexes the women of the Bolshevik Party
where either supposed to be docile low-profile babushkas or
masculine worker heroines that stared grimly into the future
while they shoveled coal or shot Germans. Independent women
with a frightening lot of free will did not fit into the picture,
especially not Stalin’s.
As the Party’s disgust with what it had unleashed caught
up with Jezjov, Jevgenija’s time was up as well. When
Beria produced evidence that she was a British spy, Jezjov
divorced her and started to kill off her lovers in an attempt
to save himself. Jevgenija killed herself with sleeping pills
to save her adopted daughter from death or imprisonment (On
her deathbed Jezjov sent her a garden gnome, probably some
private joke on his diminutive statue.). Nadia Jezjova was
indeed spared, but over the next years an amazing number of
her mother’s lovers where rounded up and killed. Jevgenija
was buried quite close to the mass grave that holds both her
husband and several of her lovers. |
