Hello and welcome to Season 3 Episode 1 of Bad Gaze, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history.

We want to thank our audience so much for being so loyal for coming back to hear more stories of nefarious nancies throughout time,

and we're really proud as to how far it's gotten and to how many people we've already been able to cover,

and we're looking forward to taking it even further this season. I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the

board of Berlin's Schullesmuseum. And I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and author. So, Hugh, you're

going to take us off for today's episode. Who are we going to profile today?

Today I want to discuss a man variously known as the Iron Hedgehog and a malignant dwarf, but

also is charming, courteous, and most importantly, a good party man, a man who held a position

of the People's Commerce Officer for Internal Affairs, the head of the NKVD during Stardin's

Great Purge, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezov.

Discussing his life, and especially his sexuality, is going to be hard.

The nature of Soviet documentation means everything must be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.

Even at the time, what was written as the truth about his life changed quite significantly.

We don't even really know where he was born, maybe Lithuania or the Soviet Union, or Russia as it then was.

And claims for either are sort of loaded with this political significance.

After he died, things became more complicated, and rumour and disavowal are written as truth after the fact for political

reasons.

Official Soviet sources may need that sort of pinch of salt, but they're also not necessarily

untruthful, while accounts of his crimes can contain distortion, exaggeration or falsification,

especially as the Cold War began in earnest in the 1940s and 50s.

But a large amount of what I'm

going to quote from today is drawn from the research of the American historian Jay Arch Getty

...