Genrikh Yagoda

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(b. Lódź in Russian Poland, 1891; d. 15 Mar. 1938) Chairman of the NKVD 1934 – 6 Yagoda was the son of a Jewish carpenter. After secondary education he became a statistician. He worked for the father of Sverdlov and married into the Sverdlov family. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1907 and was imprisoned for two years in 1911. He served in the army from 1915 to 1917 and helped organize the Red Guard in Petrograd in 1917. Yagoda served in the Cheka in the Civil War as well as holding some administrative posts. Dzerzhinsky appointed him second deputy chairman of the GPU (secret police) in 1923, and he became deputy head of the GPU in 1926, serving under Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. As Menzhinsky's health declined after 1929, Yagoda was effectively in control of the secret police. He disapproved of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture though the secret police were closely involved in its implementation. From July 1934 to September 1936 he was chairman of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), and had overall control of the purges which took place after Kirov's murder in 1934. It is generally believed that he had no prior knowledge of the murder. In 1936 he was replaced by Yezhov and made Commissar for Communications. He was arrested in April 1937, accused of having been first a tsarist then a Nazi agent, and executed in 1938 after a show trial alongside Bukharin, Rykov, and others. Yagoda always had a fearful reputation in the Soviet Union and was not rehabilitated.

(1891 - 1938), state security official, general commissar of state security (1935).

Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda was a native of Rybinsk, the son of an artisan and the second cousin of the revolutionary leader Yakov Sverdlov, to whose niece he was married. He finished eight classes of gymnasium in Nizhni Novgorod before joining an anarchist-communist group (1907), and later the Social Democratic Party (December 1907). In 1912 he was arrested and exiled to Simbirsk. After returning from exile, he joined the army as a soldier and corporal in the Fifth Corps (1914 - 1917) and was wounded in action. In 1917, Yagoda worked with the journal, Soldatskaya Pravda, before taking part in the October Revolution in Petrograd. He entered the Cheka (military intelligence service) in November 1919 and was attached to the Special (00) Branch (watchdog of the military), and by July 1920 was a member of the Cheka Collegium. He worked his way up in the Cheka-GPUOGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, forerunner of the KGB), heading the Special Branch and later the Secret Political Department (watchdog of the intellectual life). In July 1927 he was the First Deputy Chairman of OGPU, but was later replaced by Ivan Akulov and demoted to deputy chairman. During the last two years, serving under the sickly Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Yagoda actually ran the punitive organs. Taking an active part in working against Josef Stalin's enemies, he was rewarded by being elected as candidate member of the Central Committee (1930) and later as a full member (1934). After Menzhinsky's death in May 1934, the OGPU was re-formed as NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) on July 10, 1934, and Yagoda became its first commissar, the only Jew to hold this position. In 1935, when the rank of marshall of the Soviet Union was introduced in the Red Army, Yagoda received the equivalent rank of commissar general of state security, held by only two others (his successors Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria).

For the next two years, Yagoda faithfully served Stalin and played a major part in organizing the Great Terror. He worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first show trials and in the slaughters of the Red Army high command. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during 1934 and 1935. The Gulag was vastly expanded under Yagoda's stewardship, and the use of slave labor became a major part of the Soviet economy. Stalin, however, was not satisfied with Yagoda's performance and organized a campaign to remove him, using, among others, Lazar Kaganovich, who began to complain about the organs' laxness toward "Trotskyists." Stalin's telegram of August 25, 1936, from Sochi to members of the Politburo, sealed Yagoda's fate. Yagoda was then appointed as the Commissar of Communications (1936 - 1937). Arrested on March 28, 1937,Yagoda was tried as a member of the "Right-Trotskyist Bloc" in the last of the show trials. Yagoda and other defendants had to face Vyshinsky and the hanging judge, Vasily Ulrikh, with whom Yagoda had worked closely in the past. The former chief of the secret police remained stoical despite the obvious measures used to extract the necessary confessions. Sentenced to death, he was executed on March 15, 1938, a fate shared by several members of his family, but his son miraculously survived. Yagoda has not been rehabilitated.

Bibliography

Andrew, Christopher, and Gordievsky, Oleg. (1990). KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. New York: HarperCollins.

—MICHAEL PARRISH

Genrikh Yagoda Russian: Генрих Григорьевич Ягода
Genrikh Yagoda in 1936
People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD)
In office July 1934 – September 1936
Preceded by	none
Succeeded by	Nikolai Yezhov
Born	1891 Rybinsk, Russian Empire
Died	March 15, 1938 Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (Russian: Генрих Григорьевич Ягода; born Enon Gershеvich Ieguda (Russian: Енон Гершевич Иегуда)^[1]; 1891 – March 15, 1938) was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.

Contents 1 Early Life and Career 2 NKVD Chief 3 Fall from power 4 Notes

Early Life and Career

Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into the family of a Jewish watchmaker Gersh Filippovich Ieguda and a Russian mother Maria Gavrilovna^[2].

Yagoda joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, he rose through the ranks of the Cheka (the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923. After Dzerzhinsky's death in July 1926, Yagoda became deputy chairman under Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Due to Menzhinsky's serious illness, Yagoda was in effective control of the secret police in the late 1920s. In 1931, Yagoda was demoted to second deputy chairman.

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 secret police, the NKVD.

Yagoda was notorious for his love of gambling and womanizing.^[3] He may have been involved with the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, whom he was later accused of poisoning, and the popular Leningrad party head and Stalin opponent Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in suspicious circumstances in December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev.^[4]

Yagoda oversaw the interrogation process leading to the first Moscow Show Trial and subsequent execution of former Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936, an important milestone in Stalin's Great Purge. Yagoda was one of the founders of the GULAG concentration camp system.^[5] However, on September 16, 1936 he was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who oversaw the height of the purges in 1937-1938.

Fall from power

Initially he became People's Commissar for Post and Telecommunications. However in March 1937, Yagoda himself was arrested on Stalin's orders. During the Trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen), Yagoda extracted confessions from the defendants, thus inadvertently revealing that the men had no political differences with Stalin, a point the Soviet state prosecutor was unable to challenge^{[citation needed]}. This infuriated Stalin^{[citation needed]}, as it implied that Stalin 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^{[citation needed]}, whom Stalin had forced from power. As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing."^[6] 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.^[7]

Yagoda was executed by shooting shortly after the trial. His successor and former deputy Nikolai Yezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and severely beat him for added humiliation just before his execution^{[citation needed]}. Yezhov himself would suffer exactly the same treatment at the order of his successor and former deputy, Lavrenti Beria, before dying by the same hand (NKVD Chief Executioner Vasili Blokhin) just two years later.^{[citation needed]}

Alexander Orlov, also Jewish by birth, attributed the following conversation to Yagoda during his last days at the Lubyanka prison before his execution. When asked by his interrogator if he believed in God, Yagoda replied, "From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am and judge for yourself: is there a God, or not..."^[8]

Notes

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1. ^ Chronos. Bibliography Index. Genrikh Yagoda (Russian)
2. ^ See Zvi Gitelman. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd expanded edition, Indiana University Press, 1988, 2001, ISBN 0-253-21418-1 , p.112
3. ^ See Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, Knopf, 2004, ISBN 1-4000-4230-5
4. ^ Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), p. 252
5. ^ See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago Vol I-IV, Harper & Row, 1973
6. ^ Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), pp. 295-296
7. ^ See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago Vol I-II, Harper & Row, 1973, ISBN 0-06-013914-5
8. ^ See "Yagoda in his Prison Cell," in Alexander Orlov The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, Knopf, 1953.

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