Ezhov's Pinching

Besides beating, sleep deprivation and psychological torment, the NKVD interrogators employed other barbaric and hideous techniques to squeeze out the desirable testimonies from the arrested “enemies of the people.” In the exceptional cases they utilized air pumps, hot rods, bottles (which were shoved into the anus or vagina), rats (which were, for example, placed in the heated can, upon which the inmates were sited; I heard also that the rats could have been sewn-in to the abdomen of the inmate). Pinching of the testicles was also a tool in their arsenal. Merely mentioning of a potentiality to use any of these techniques was sufficient to retrieve self-incriminating testimonials from the prisoners, whatever phantasmagorical they could have

Ezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and beat him for added humiliation just before his execution. Ezhov would suffer exactly the same fate just two years later at the order of his successor and former deputy, Lavrenty Beria. Ezhov was even killed by the same executioner (NKVD chief executioner, Vasily Blokhin). His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record, and earned him the Guinness World Record for ‘Most Prolific Executioner’ in

On October 28, 1987, during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, Mandelstam was exonerated from the 1934 charges as well. Thus his reputation was fully rehabilitated. In 1977 a minor planet was discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh and was named 3461 Mandelshtam after him.
Pasternak was not exiled or imprisoned. Despite this, a Bill Mauldin cartoon in the American press showed Pasternak and another prisoner in the Gulag splitting trees in the snow. In the caption, Pasternak says, “I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?” The cartoon (Bill Mauldin Beyond Willie and Joe (Library of Congress)) won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1959.
One of the Mandelstam poems, which reflects the poet’s apprehension of the time, is presented below in Russian (four first lines) and my English