Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да; 7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda (Енох Гершевич Иегуда) was a director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events that manifested the beginnings of the Great Purge.

Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda was ultimately a victim of the Purge himself. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936, and arrested in 1937. Charged with the standard crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism, and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.

Early life and career
Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. Contrary to the rumors invented by himself, Yagoda was never a pharmacist but in fact an apprentice engraver in Yakov Sverdlov's father's workshop. Yagoda subsequently married Sverdlov's niece Ida Averbach which permitted him, after the October Revolution of 1917, to be promoted through the ranks of the Cheka (the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923. After Dzerzhinsky's appointment as chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy in January 1924, Yagoda became the real manager of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, as the deputy chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky had little authority because of his serious illness. The troika Grigory Zinoviev-Lev Kamenev-Joseph Stalin wanted a symbolic direction represented by Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and an effective direction represented by Yagoda who was neither a people's commissar or a central committee member to ensure that the GPU remained loyal to the party. In 1931, Yagoda was demoted to second deputy chairman.

As deputy head of the GPU, Yagoda organized the building of the White Sea – Baltic Canal using forced labor from the Gulag system at breakneck speed between 1931 and 1933 at the cost of huge casualties. For his contribution to the canal’s construction he was later awarded the Order of Lenin. The construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal was also started under his watch but only completed after his fall by his successor Nikolai Yezhov.

NKVD Chief


On July 10, 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included oversight of regular as well as the secret police, the NKVD.

Yagoda may have been involved with the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, whom he was later accused of poisoning, and the popular Leningrad party director and Stalin opponent Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev.

Yagoda worked closely in conjunction with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, resulting in the successful prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936, part of Stalin's Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and its ranks were decimated by Yagoda as a precursor to the later more extensive purge. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 1934–1935 period and the Gulag system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, forced labor becoming a major factor in the Soviet economy.

Nevertheless, Stalin became increasingly disillusioned with Yagoda's performance. In the middle of 1936, Stalin received a report from Yagoda detailing the unfavorable public reaction abroad to the show trials and the growing sympathy amongst the Soviet population for the executed defendants. The report enraged Stalin, interpreting it as Yagoda's advice to stop the show trials and in particular to abandon the planned purge of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union and the former commander in chief of the Red Army. Stalin was already unhappy with Yagoda's services, mostly due to the mismanagement of Kirov's assassination and his failure to fabricate "proofs" of Kamenev's and Zinoniev's ties with the Okhrana.

On September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a telegram (co-signed by Andrei Zhdanov) to the members of the Politburo. The telegram read: "We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinonievite bloc. The GPU was four years late in this matter. All party heads and the most of the NKVD agents in the region are talking about this." A day later, he was replaced by Yezhov, who managed the main purges during 1937–1938.

Disgrace
Initially Yagoda became People's Commissar for Post and Telecommunications. However in March 1937, he was arrested on Stalin's orders. Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1907. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda trying to assassinate him. Yagoda's two Moscow apartments and his dacha contained 3,904 pornographic photos, 11 pornographic films, 165 pornographic pipes, one dildo and the two bullets that killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov took over the apartments. The charge of corruption at least was accurate. He had spent four million roubles decorating his three homes, boasting that his garden had '2,000 orchids and roses'.

During the trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen), Yagoda extracted confessions from the defendants, thus revealing inadvertently that the men did not have any political differences with Stalin, a fact the Soviet state prosecutor was unable to challenge. This infuriated Stalin, as it implied that he had eliminated the defendants solely to maintain his own political power. Yagoda had already earned Stalin's enmity eight years earlier, when he had expressed sympathy for Nikolai Bukharin, whom Stalin had forced from power.

As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing." Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty One in March 1938. Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself:

Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.

Yagoda was shot soon after the trial as were 3,000 of his NKVD supporters. His successor and former deputy Yezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and beat him for added humiliation just before his execution. Yezhov himself would suffer exactly the same treatment at the order of his successor and former deputy, Lavrenti Beria, before dying by the same executioner (NKVD Chief Executioner Vasili Blokhin) just two years later.

Honours and awards

 * Order of Lenin
 * Order of the Red Banner, twice (1927, 1930)
 * Order of the Red Banner of Labour of the RSFSR (1932)