YAGODA, GENRIKH GRIGOREVICH

(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.

See also: purges, the great; show trials; state security, organs of

bibliography

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

Michael Parrish