Yakov Agranov

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Yakov Saulovich Agranov (Russian: Я́ков Сау́лович Агра́нов) (born Sorenson; 1893 – 1938) — a prominent member of the Cheka, the forerunner of the Soviet KGB. He was born in a Jewish family in Checherskaya, a village in the Gomel province of the Russian Empire. In 1912 he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and in 1915 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1918 Agranov became secretary of Sovnarkom. At this time he was taking orders directly from Vladimir Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky. During this period Agranov was in charge of the forced emigration of leading figures of Russian science and culture as potentially anti-Soviet elements (among those expelled were Nikolai Berdyaev and Nikolai Lossky).

From 1919 until his death he was a prominent member of the Cheka (later the OGPU and then NKVD) (KGB). Agranov was Genrikh Yagoda's deputy during Stalin's Great Purge. In 1921 Agranov was the chief investigator regarding the “Petrograd militant organization”, headed by Professor Tagantsev. The investigation ended with more than 85 persons being sentenced to death, including the poet Nikolay Gumilyov. It is believed that most people were framed and that there was little substance to the affair. All concerned were promptly executed. Agranov also investigated the Kronstadt rebellion and the peasant uprising in the Tambov region. At the end of his career he was fabricating cases for the Trial of the Twenty One, against the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization and the later shown to be mythical “Promparty” and “Working Peasant Party ” cases.

Agranov is also implicated in the suspicious “suicide” of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1930.

Immediately after the assassination of Sergey Kirov in Leningrad in 1934, Agranov was entrusted with the organization of mass reprisals in the city. The interrogation sessions of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky were conducted under his supervision. The cynical motto “If there is no enemy, he should be created, denounced and punished” was attributed to Yakov Agranov. His career and life come to an end when in 1938 he himself was accused of being a Trotskyite sympathizer and executed by firing squad as an “enemy of the people”.