Genrikh Yagoda

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Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (; born Yenokh (Enoch) Gershonovich Yehuda ; 1891 – March 15, 1938) was the head of the NKVD

NKVD

Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.

da was born in Rybinsk

Rybinsk

Rybinsk is the second largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia. It lies at the confluence of the Volga River and Sheksna rivers....
in a Jewish family, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, he rose through the ranks of the Cheka
Cheka

The Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet Union state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by an aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky....
(the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923.

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Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (; born Yenokh (Enoch) Gershonovich Yehuda ; 1891 – March 15, 1938) was the head of the NKVD

NKVD

Soviet Union

Early Life and Career

Yagoda was born in Rybinsk

Rybinsk

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky

Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky , ) was a Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Communist Party of the Soviet Union official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934....
. 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

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
appointed Yagoda "People's Commissar for Internal Affairs," a position that included oversight of regular as well as secret police, the NKVD

NKVD

The NKVD or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the leading secret police organization of the Soviet Union that was responsible for Soviet political repressions during the Stalinism era....
.

Yagoda was notorious for his love of gambling and womanizing. When eventually arrested, pornographic material including photographs and films was found in his house. 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 under suspicious circumstances in December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev

Leonid Nikolaev

Leonid Nikolaev was the assassin of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Saint Petersburg branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union....
.

Yagoda oversaw the interrogation process leading to the first Moscow Show Trial

Moscow Trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge. Many of the defendants were executed....
and subsequent execution of former Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev

Grigory Zinoviev

Gregory Yevseevich Zinoviev...
and Lev Kamenev

Lev Kamenev

was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet Union politician. He was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and a founding member and later chairman of the ruling Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee....
in August 1936, an important milestone in Stalin's Great Purge

Great Purge

Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936-1938. Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of kulaks, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliat...
. Yagoda was one of the founders of the GULAG

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. Gulag is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the NKVD....
concentration camp system. However, on September 16, 1936 he was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovschina" ....
, who oversaw the height of the purges in 1937-1938.

Fall from power

Initially he was became People's Commissar for Post and Telecommunications

People's Commissariat for Post and Telegraph

People's Commissariat for Post and Telegraph, Potel was part of the Soviet Government.The first commissar was Nikolai Glebov-Avilov, who sat on Sovnarkom, which in 1918 became the Council of Ministers of the USSR....
. However in March 1937, Yagoda himself was arrested on Stalin's orders. During the Trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen)

Moscow Trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge. Many of the defendants were executed....
, Yagoda extracted confessions from the defendants inadvertently revealing that the men had no political differences with Stalin, a point the Soviet state prosecutor was unable to challenge. This infuriated Stalin, as it implied that Stalin had eliminated the defendants solely to maintain his own political power. He had already earned Stalin's emnity eight years earlier, when Yagoda had expressed sympathy for Nikolai Bukharin

Nikolai Bukharin

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917 and intelligentsia and Soviet Union politician....
, whom Stalin had forced from power. As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing." Yagoda was found guilty of treason

Treason

In law, treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of loyalty to one's sovereignty or nation. Historically, treason also covered the murder of specific social superiors, such as the murder of a husband by his wife ....
and conspiracy

Conspiracy (political)

In a political sense, conspiracy refers to a group of persons united in the goal of usurping or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'?tat or through assassination....
against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty One

Trial of the Twenty One

The Trial of the Twenty-One was the last of the Moscow Trials, show trials of prominent Bolsheviks, including the Old Bolsheviks. The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of Joseph Stalin Great Purge....
in March 1938. Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russians novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labour camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974....
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

White Sea-Baltic Canal

The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal , often abbreviated to White Sea Canal is a ship canal in Russia opened on 2 August 1933. It connects the White Sea with the Baltic Sea, near to Saint Petersburg....
!" 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 executed by shooting shortly after the trial.

Alexander Orlov

Alexander Orlov

Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov was a Soviet Union espionage Administrator of the Government. He defected to the United States in 1938. He warned Leon Trotsky of his impending assassination....
, also Russian by birth, attributed the following conversation to Yagoda during his last days at the Lubyanka

Lubyanka (KGB)

The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It is a large building with a facade of yellow brick, designed by Alexander V....
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..."