His crimes unfolded across a span of months in 2002, each killing tied to robbery — apartments, taxis, a village store — with victims chosen opportunistically and the amounts stolen often numbering in the thousands of rubles. What extended his presence on a site like this is less the scale than the duration: Lozovoi evaded capture for six years while on an international wanted list, during which investigators suspected the confirmed murders represented only part of his record. Psychiatric evaluation described him not as psychotic but as a sane, excitable psychopath — a distinction that carried legal weight at sentencing.

As head of the NKVD during the bloodiest years of Stalin's Great Purge, Yezhov oversaw a machinery of mass detention, coerced confession, and execution that consumed hundreds of thousands of lives — a period so defined by his methods that it came to be called the Yezhovshchina. His administrative efficiency in directing the terror made him both indispensable and, ultimately, expendable; Stalin dissolved the apparatus around him and had him arrested on the same grounds used against countless victims before him.