Genrikh Yagoda

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Genrikh Yagoda
Russian: Генрих Григорьевич Ягода
Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Yagoda
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, USSR (executed)
Political party Communist Party of the Soviet Union

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

Yagoda was born in Rybinsk in a Jewish[2] family, and 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. 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.

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 Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in December 1934[citation needed].

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. However, on September 16, 1936 he was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who oversaw the height of the purges in 1937-1938. In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested. He 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.[4]

Yagoda was executed by shooting shortly after the trial.

Alexander Orlov, another Jew 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..."[5]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Chronos. Bibliography Index. Genrikh Yagoda (Russian) [1]
  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. ^ See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago Vol I-II, Harper & Row, 1973, ISBN 0-06-013914-5
  5. ^ See "Yagoda in his Prison Cell," in Alexander Orlov The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, Knopf, 1953.