Genrikh Yagoda
| Genrikh Yagoda Russian: Генрих Григорьевич Ягода | |
|---|---|
 Genrikh Yagoda in 1936 | |
| People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD) | |
|
In office 10 July 1934 – 26 September 1936 | |
| Preceded by | Vyacheslav Menzhinsky |
| Succeeded by | Nikolai Yezhov |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda 7 November 1891 Rybinsk, Russian Empire |
| Died |
15 March 1938 (aged 46) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Nationality | Soviet |
| Political party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
| Spouse(s) | Ida Averbach Авербах, Ида Леонидовна |
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Russian: Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да; 7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda (Russian: Енох Гершевич Иегуда) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's 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 initiated the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using slave labor from the GULAG system, during which many laborers died.
Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda himself was ultimately a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with the 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
Yagoda was born in Rybinsk[1] into a Jewish family. He joined the Bolshevik movement in the summer of 1917.[2] Contrary to the rumors invented by himself, Yagoda was never a pharmacist but in fact an apprentice engraver in the workshop of the father of Yakov Sverdlov, a prominent Bolshevik leader. Yagoda subsequently married Sverdlov's niece Ida Averbakh, which permitted him, after the October Revolution of 1917, to be promoted through the ranks of the Cheka (the predecessor of the NKVD) to become the second deputy of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, 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 State Political Directorate, 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 nor a central committee member, to ensure that the State Political Directorate 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.[3] For his contribution to the canal's construction he was later awarded the Order of Lenin.[4] The construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal was also started under his watch, but only completed after his fall by his successor Nikolai Yezhov.[5]
NKVD Chief
On 10 July 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included the oversight of both the regular and the secret police, the NKVD. Yagoda worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, which resulted in the prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936 as part of Stalin's Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and its ranks were thinned by Yagoda, as a precursor to the later and more extensive purge in the Russian military. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 1934–1935 period; the GULAG system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, and slave labor became a major developmental resource in the Soviet economy.
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 among 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 ties between Kamenev and Zinoviev and the Okhrana (the tsarist security organization).[6]
On 25 September 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."[7]
A day later, he was replaced by Yezhov, who managed the main purges during 1937–1938.
Involvement in the Holodomor
Yagoda is held responsible, through his authority as a Soviet official, for the implementation of Stalin's policies that caused the deaths of more than 7 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor.[8][9] Yagoda, as an NKVD official, would have been involved with the seizures or blockades of food, tools, etc., and the movement of inhabitants. Though people elsewhere in the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933, the authorities in Ukraine went much further by quarantining and starving the population. On the basis of performances in that famine he was promoted in 1934 to a full-fledged member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Corruption and arrest
In 1936, Yagoda was demoted to the post of People's Commissar for Post and Telegraph. 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 1917. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda as an attempt to assassinate him. It was discovered that 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.[10] Yezhov took over the apartments. He had spent four million roubles decorating his three homes, boasting that his garden had "2,000 orchids and roses."[11]
During the trial of Radek and Piatakov (the 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 out from power.
As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing."[12] 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.[13]
Yagoda was summarily shot soon after the trial.[14] His wife Ida Averbakh was also executed in 1938.
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)
Notes
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Genrikh Yagoda. |
- ↑ "Genrikh Yagoda". http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSyagoda.htm. External link in
|website=(help); - ↑ Бажанов, Борис; Кривицкий, Вальтер; Орлов, Александр (2014). Ягода. Смерть главного чекиста (сборник). ISBN 978-5-457-26136-5.
- ↑ Gulag, The Storm projects - The White Sea Canal, Gulag.eu. Retrieved 28 August 2011.
- ↑ Russia: Canal Heroes, Time Magazine; 14 August 1933. Retrieved 28 August 2011.
- ↑ Russia: Stalin's Mercy; Time Magazine; 26 July 1937. Retrieved on 28 August 2011.
- ↑ Brackman, Roman., The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, London: Frank Cass Publishers (2001), p. 231
- ↑ Medvedev, Roy., Let History Judge, New York (1971), p. 174
- ↑ http://www.ukemonde.com/genocide/margolisholocaust.html
- ↑ Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala, Sławomir Dębski (2010). Rafał Lemkin - Holodomor: the Ukrainian holocaust. Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowyc. p. 225
- ↑ Montefiore 2007, p. 195.
- ↑ Montefiore 2007, p. 85.
- ↑ Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), pp. 295-296
- ↑ See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago Vol I-II, Harper & Row, 1973, ISBN 0-06-013914-5
- ↑ Лаврентия Берию в 1953 году расстрелял лично советский маршал
Bibliography
- Kotkin, Stephen (2014). Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-698-17010-0.
- Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2007). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-42793-9.
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