Yevgenia Feigenberg

Yevgenia Khayutina-Yezhova with her daughter Natalia, whom she and Yezhov adopted

Yevgenia Feigenberg (Russian: Евге́ния Фейгенберг), also known as Yevgenia Solomonovna Khayutina (Russian: Евге́ния Соломо́новна Хаю́тина); (1904, Gomel – November 21, 1938, Moscow) was a Soviet editor, host of a literary salon, and the last wife of Nikolai Yezhov.

Biography

Early years

Born in Gomel in 1904, she was the youngest child in a large merchant family of Solomon (Zalman) Leibovich Feigenberg and Esfiri Mikhailovna (Meilakhovna), née Krymskaya. She married for the first time at the age of 17 to Lazar Khayutin (1898-1948), with whom she moved in 1921 to Odessa, where she worked in the editorial office of the local magazine. During this period, she met Odessa writers Valentin Kataev, Yury Olesha, and Isaac Babel. They may have helped her later find a job in Moscow at Gudok, a newspaper for railroad workers.

She married a second time to the former Red commander, Alexander Fedorovich Gladun, whom she met during one of his business trips to Odessa while serving as director of the Moscow publishing house “Economic Life”. She moved to Moscow with him in 1924.

In 1927, she accompanied Gladun when he was sent on diplomatic assignment in London as the second secretary of the USSR embassy in Great Britain. When Gladun was recalled to Moscow due to a spy scandal Yevgenia was sent to Berlin, where she worked as a typist at the Soviet trade mission. She returned to Moscow at the end of 1928.

Notoriety as Yezhov's wife

She met Nikolai Yezhov at a sanatorium in Sochi in September 1929. They married in 1931.

In addition to working at the newspaper “Gudok”, she also worked on the “Peasant Newspaper” and as editor of the magazine USSR in Construction. Her Moscow apartment and dacha hosted literary and musical evenings, which were attended by famous writers and cultural figures: the authors Isaac Babel, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Mikhail Koltsov, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the comedian and jazz musician Leonid Utesov, as well as General Semyon Uritsky and members of the Soviet nomenklatura.

Her marriage to Yezhov was in name only by this point. She was described as frivolous; her favorite dance was the foxtrot. Her affair with Mikhail Sholokhov began in this period; she also had close relationships with the writer Isaac Babel and the Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt.

Yevgenia Solomonovna’s activities did not go unnoticed by Stalin, who twice told Yezhov about the need to divorce his wife. Stalin was alarmed by her connection with the Deputy Chairman of the Board of the State Bank of the USSR Grigory Arkus (1896-1936), who was repressed in the case of the “Trotskyists”.

Decline and suicide

In May 1938 Yezhova’s mental health deteriorated to the point that she was forced to leave her post at “USSR in Construction”. Together with Zinaida Glikina, her friend and an employee of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers, she went to Crimea. Their vacation was interrupted by a call from Yezhov, who ordered them to urgently return to Moscow. Yezhov settled his wife with Zinaida Glikina at the dacha.

On September 18, 1938, Yezhov informed Yevgenia of his decision to divorce her. The next day she turned to Stalin for “help and protection”. Stalin did not respond.

On October 29, 1938, with a diagnosis of “astheno-depressive state” (cyclothymia), Yevgenia was admitted to the Vorovsky Sanatorium located on the outskirts of Moscow which treated patients with severe forms of psychoneurosis.

However, it was not troubles in her relationship with her husband that led Yevgenia Yezhova to her end. In the fall of 1938, many people from her entourage were arrested one after another, including, on November 15, 1938, two of her closest friends, Zinaida Glikina (1901-01/25/1940), and Zinaida Koriman (1899-01/25/1940), who worked as a technical editor at “USSR in Construction”. Yevgenia herself, as Yezhov’s sister Evdokia later said, received an anonymous letter accusing her of espionage. Yevgenia wrote a second letter to Stalin, which, like the first, remained unanswered.

Then she wrote to her husband and in response, on November 8, 1938, she received sleeping pills, which she had been using regularly for some time, as well as a trinket. In the early 2000s, the opinion was expressed that this particular strange trinket was a conventional sign - “this is the end”, but it there is no documentary evidence for that supposition.

Two days after the arrest of her friends, Yevgenia Solomonovna took sleeping pills, and two more days later, November 19, 1938, died without regaining consciousness. The autopsy states: “The corpse of a woman, 34 years old, of average height, correct physique, good nutrition... Death occurred as a result of luminal poisoning”. She was buried at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Her husband was not present at the funeral; he was shot a year later.

Adopted daughter

The Yezhovs did not have any children of their own, and in 1933 they adopted a five-month-old girl, Natalya, from an orphanage. After her father’s arrest, 6-year-old Natalya was placed in orphanage No. 1 in Penza in 1939 and received her mother’s surname, Khayutina, under which she later lived. Natalya Khayutina lived in Penza for about 19 years.

After graduating from the Penza Music College in 1958, she was assigned to the Magadan region, where she lived until the collapse of the USSR in the village of Ola. During the years of perestroika, she unsuccessfully tried to achieve the rehabilitation of her adoptive father. She died in January 2016.

Family

Yevgenia Feigenberg had three brothers: Ilya Solomonovich (Elias Zalmanovich, 1893-1940, executed), Isaac, and Moisei Zalmanovich (1890-1965), author of works on accounting. Her nephew was the psychiatrist and psychophysiologist Joseph Moiseevich Feigenberg (1922-2016), Doctor of Medical Sciences, professor at the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Studies. Her cousin Leo Meerovich Feigenberg (1887-1961), a lawyer, was married to Emma Solomonovna Rabinovich (1889-1955), the daughter of the writer Sholem Aleichem; their sons were the Danish theater director and theater critic Meir Feigenberg (1923-2006) and the Swedish psychiatrist Loma (Sholom-Hertz) Feigenberg (1918-1988), author of scientific works in the field of psycho-oncology and thanatology and Professor at the Karolinska Institute.

The niece of her first husband, Lazar Khayutina, art critic Victoria Borisovna Volpina (mother Khayutina-Pisak Faina Vladimirovna, father Pisak Boris Yakovlevich), was married to mathematician and human rights activist Alexander Sergeevich Yesenin-Volpin from 1962 to 1972.

In literature and cinema

• Investigator Nikitin's case (2012)
• Vasily Grossman, short story “Mother”

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