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Genrik Grigorievich Yagoda

Genrik Grigorievich Yagoda (real name - Yehuda Enoch Gershevich, November 7 (19), 1891, Rybinsk of Yaroslavl Province - March 15, 1938, Moscow), was one of the main leaders of the Soviet punitive bodies: the Cheka, the OGPU and the NKVD.

He was born into a family of a Jewish artisans (printmaker-engraver), son of Gershon Fishelevich Yehuda. Soon after the birth of Enoch, the Yehuda family moved from Rybinsk to Nizhny Novgorod, where their close relatives, the Sverdlovs, lived. The future leader of Bolshevism, Yakov Sverdlov and Enoch-Heinrich Yehuda-Yagoda were second cousins. Subsequently, Enoch married Yakov's niece, Ide Averbakh, the sister of the famous Soviet writer Leopold Averbakh.

Like Sverdlov, the Yehud family had revolutionary and criminal ties. In 1904 he was hiding in the apartment an underground printing house of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the RSDLP(b). In December 1905, during the December armed uprising in Sormovo, the elder brother of Enoch, 15-year-old Mikhail, died.

Enoch Yagoda himself in his youth was more closely connected not with the Social Democrats, but with communist anarchists, taking part in the development of plans for bank robbery. In the summer of 1912, Yagoda, who had moved to Moscow, was detained there for contacting the revolutionaries. He was deported for two years to Simbirsk, but the following year he was amnestied in connection with the 300th anniversary of the Romanovs' house. To get the right to settle in St. Petersburg (outside the "Pale of Settlement"), Yagoda formally passed from Judaism to Orthodoxy.

In pre-revolutionary years, Enoch-Henry met Maxim Gorky, who had close contact with the Sverdlov family. (As early as 1902 the writer adopted his elder brother, Yakov Sverdlov, Zinovy.) Yagoda began to move away from anarchism and draw closer to the Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution, thanks to the patronage of Yakov Sverdlov, he began to make a rapidly advancing communist career. Already in 1920 Yagoda became a member of the Presidium of the Cheka, and in September 1923 - second deputy chairman of the OGPU.

In July 1926, Felix Dzerzhinsky died. The head of the OGPU became Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, who was by then ill. The actual head of the main punitive organ of the Bolsheviks became a younger and healthy Yagoda, who made a strong contribution to Stalin in the struggle against the "united opposition" of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. In October 1927 the OGPU dispersed opposition demonstrations in honor of the 10th anniversary of the "Great October Revolution".

From 1930, Yagoda was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b), andn from 1934 a member of the Central Committee. During collectivization (the most brutal wave of Stalin's terror), he mercilessly suppressed peasant uprisings and evicted "kulaks" in Siberia. Yagoda took an active part in the creation of the Gulag. He led the construction of the White Sea Canal, which was almost useless but absorbed many thousands of Zek [prisoners] lives (for which he received the Order of Lenin in August 1933), and even wore the title of "the first initiator, organizer and ideological leader of the socialist industry of the taiga and the North." At the last sluice of the White Sea Channel, a thirty-meter five-pointed star with a huge bronze bust of Yagoda inside was erected.

In July 1934, the OGPU was transformed into the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) and entered a more extensive new structure, the NKVD of the USSR. Yagoda at the same time headed both the NKVD and the GUGB.

In the 1930s, he became closer to Gorky, who had returned to the USSR from abroad. Yagoda became a friend of his family and lover of Nadezhda Peshkova ("Timoshi") - the wife of Maxim Gorky's son.

Since the mid-1930s, Stalin's repressions began to affect not only the simple population of the USSR, but also the highest communist oligarchy. The Father of the Peoples was clearly going to create a purely absolutist regime of personal power, and this was not liked by many of his closest associates. Among such hidden oppositionists (who did not act out of "liberal" motives, but on motives of personal gain) belonged Yagoda. In 1934-1936, at the insistence of Stalin, he participated in the organization of the courts in questionable cases of the murder of Kirov, the "Kremlin conspiracy," in the organization of the trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev. However, against the party elite, Yagoda acted extremely reluctantly, and Stalin knew this.

In September 1936, Yagoda was removed from the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, and was replaced by N. Yezhov, the main "hero" of the Great Terror. Yagoda was appointed a People's Commissar of Communications, but in January of the following year he was removed from this post. He was expelled from the party, arrested in March 1937, accused of links with Trotsky, Bukharin and Rykov, and the murder of Gorky. During the search in the Yagoda's house, it was said that many pornographic items, women's clothing and even a rubber phallus were found.

He became one of the main defendants in the "Trial of the Right-Trotskyite Bloc" (1938). At this trial court, Yagoda pleaded guilty in part. During his speech, he appealed to Stalin asking for pardon, speaking as if the Leader was present in the room and he hears his words. A. Solzhenitsyn in the "Gulag Archipelago" believed that Stalin did indeed observe the trial from a hidden room, and Yagoda knew about it. March 15, 1938 Yagoda was shot.

In April 2015, the Russian Supreme Court refused to rehabilitate him, citing the numerous crimes he committed.