military and security personnel in the Far East, including 16 senior NKVD officials, who were shot, and the commander of the Far Eastern Army, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Blyukher. While Frinovsky was in the Far East, Stalin proposed that he be appointed People's Commissar for the Navy, an apparent promotion, which was actually part of a manoeuvre to remove Yezhov. On 22 August 1938 it was announced that his replacement as First Deputy Chairman of the NKVD would be Lavrenti Beria. Frinovsky arrived back in Moscow on 25 August and for a few days he effectively ran the NKVD, while Beria was in Georgia arranging who would take over from him there and Yezhov was in a state of drunken depression. He seized the opportunity to have a group of former NKVD officers, including Leonid Zakovsky and Sergei Naumovich Mironov, shot, to prevent them giving evidence against him to Beria. On 8 September 1938 he was named People's Commissar for the Navy, and was sufficiently in favour to be among the guests at a lunch in the Kremlin on the 21st anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, at which Stalin and Beria were present, but Yezhov was excluded, but at the party congress in March 1939, he was not elected to the Central Committee, when one of his nominal juniors was. He wrote to Stalin on March 16, pleading to be dismissed because he knew nothing about running a navy, but he was in office, at least nominally, until his arrest on 6 April 1939. On 12 April his wife, Nina, and son, Oleg, were also arrested. All three were included in a list of 346 people Beria submitted to Stalin on 16 January 1940, with a recommendation that they all be shot. Yezhov and the writer Isaac Babel were on the same death list. Oleg Frinovsky, who was 17, was executed on 21 January and Nina Frinovskaya on 3 February. It was standard procedure that the condemned were photographed prior to execution: the last pictures of Frinovsky's wife and son are in David King, Ordinary Citizens. Mikhail Frinovsky was shot and executed by firing squad on 4 February, 1940. Awards Order of Lenin (February 14, 1936) three orders of the Red Banner (1924, 20.12.1932, 3.02.1935) Order of the Red Star (July 22, 1937) medal "XX years of the RSCA" (February 22, 1938) Order of the Red Banner of