Genrikh Yagoda - NKVD Chief

NKVD Chief

On July 10, 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included oversight of regular as well as the secret police, the NKVD.

Yagoda may have been involved with the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, whom he was later accused of poisoning, and the popular Leningrad party director and Stalin opponent Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev.

Yagoda worked closely in conjunction with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, resulting in the successful prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936, part of Stalin's Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and its ranks were decimated by Yagoda as a precursor to the later more extensive purge. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 1934–1935 period and the Gulag system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, forced labor becoming a major factor in the Soviet economy.

Nevertheless, 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 amongst 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 Kamenev's and Zinoniev's ties with the Okhrana.

On September 25, 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."

A day later, he was replaced by Yezhov, who managed the main purges during 1937–1938.