Heh

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:

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?