Stalin and His Hangmen

Iagoda’s Fall

. . . this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors . . . This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office until a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body, and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

THE FALLOUT from the trial had not been enough for Stalin. All September he had complained to Kaganovich, Molotov, and Ezhov that Pravda was explaining the case badly:

It reduces everything to the level of personalities: that there are nasty people who desire to seize power, and nice people in power. . . . The articles should have said that struggling against Stalin, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kosior, and others is struggling against the soviets, against collectivization, against industrialization, therefore a struggle to restore capitalism in the towns and villages of the USSR. For Stalin [he spoke of himself in the third person] and the other leaders are not isolated persons, but the personification of all the victories of socialism in the USSR . . . i.e., the personification of the efforts of workers, peasants, and hard-working intellectuals to smash capitalism and let socialism triumph.

Stalin ended this self-deification on a religious note: “Finally it should have said that the fall of these bastards to the state of White Guards and fascists was the logical consequence of their Fall from Grace [grekhopadenie] as oppositionists in the past. . . . This is the spirit and the direction in which agitation ought to have been conducted....” ⁴⁶

Promises to spare family members were broken. Within days Kamenev’s wife, who was also Trotsky’s sister, was in the Lubianka. The worst fears of the right wing were confirmed. Piatakov, Orjonikidze’s right-hand man in the Commissariat for Heavy Industry, was, at Stalin’s insistence, moved to the Urals, a prelude to arrest. Bukharin and Rykov were told that “the investigation had not found a legal basis for holding them criminally responsible,” a hint to both of them that this basis would soon be found. Within days of the executions, Kaganovich told Stalin, “I have the impression that perhaps Bukharin and Rykov did not maintain a direct organizational link with the Trotsky–Zinoviev bloc, but in 1932–3 and perhaps afterward they were informed of Trotskyist business. The right clearly had its own organization.” Kaganovich claimed that in purging Trotskyists from the railways, his remit as commissar for transport, he had uncovered right-wing saboteurs, too.

On September 25, 1936, Stalin finally pounced on Genrikh Iagoda. Together with Andrei Zhdanov, in whose hand the directive was written, and using a channel closed to the NKVD, Stalin telegraphed Kaganovich, Molotov, and the rest of the Politburo:

One. We deem it absolutely essential and urgent to appoint Comrade Ezhov to the post of commissar of internal affairs. Iagoda [not Comrade Iagoda] has blatantly shown himself not to be on top of his job in exposing the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc. OGPU is four years late in this business. All the party workers and most of the provincial representatives of the NKVD are saying this. Agranov can stay as Ezhov’s deputy in the NKVD. Two. We deem it essential and urgent to remove Rykov from the Commissariat of Communications and to appoint Iagoda to the post. We think this needs no explaining since it is clear as it is.

Four. As for the Party Control Commission, Ezhov can be left concurrently as its chairman, providing he gives nine tenths of his time to the NKVD. . . .

Five. Ezhov agrees to our proposals.

The Politburo was overjoyed: Kaganovich wrote immediately from his spa to Orjonikidze: “Our latest main news is Ezhov’s appointment. This the remarkably wise decision of our Parent [as Kaganovich now called Stalin] has come to fruition and has had an excellent reception in the party and country.”⁴⁷ The coup was carefully prepared: Ezhov had talked to Agranov, whose loyalty to his chief Iagoda was frayed. Agranov later reported, “Ezhov summoned me to his dacha. I must say that this meeting was conspiratorial. Ezhov passed on Stalin’s remarks about faults which the investigation had allowed to happen with the Trotskyist center case and instructed me to take measures....”⁴⁸

Stalin sent Iagoda a separate telegram. Iagoda was too clever a rat not to smell the poison in the sweet:

To Comrade Iagoda. The Commissariat of Communications is a very important business. This commissariat has defense significance. I don’t doubt you will be able to put it on its feet. I ask you particularly to agree to work in the Commissariat of Communications. Without a good commissariat we feel helpless. It can’t be left in its present state. It has to be put on its feet urgently. I. Stalin.

For a little while Iagoda kept his rank of general commissar of state security and Kaganovich was worried that the NKVD might remain loyal to him. Kaganovich told Stalin on October 14, on the eve of the latter’s return to Moscow:

Ezhov’s affairs are going well. He has gotten down to the rooting out of counterrevolutionary bandits firmly and energetically, he conducts interrogations remarkably well and with political competence. But it seems that some of the apparatus, even though it has now quieted down, will not be loyal to him. Take for example a question which has a lot of meaning for them, that of rank. There is talk that Iagoda still remains General Commissar, while Ezhov, they say, will not be given that rank and so on. . . . Don’t you think, Comrade Stalin, that it is essential to pose this question?

Iagoda fell to his doom with excruciating slowness. In 1934 he saw Stalin almost weekly when the latter was in the Kremlin; these meetings often lasted two hours. In 1935 and the first half of 1936 Stalin saw him on average once a fortnight, usually for no more than one hour. In 1934 his rival Ezhov would see Stalin as frequently, but for shorter visits. In the course of 1935 and 1936, Ezhov met Stalin more and more often and they were frequently together for three hours at a time. On July 11, 1936, Iagoda had his last meeting in Stalin’s office.

Iagoda did not take his new commissariat seriously: he spent October and November 1936 on sick leave. When he did turn up, he came late and sat idly at his desk, rolling crumbs of bread into balls or making paper airplanes. In the NKVD, Ezhov was arresting Iagoda’s subordinates, both those he had trusted and those he had quarreled with. Of Iagoda’s close associates only Iakov Agranov was still in post in the new year.

In January 1937 Iagoda lost his general secretary’s rank and on the evening of March 2 was summoned to a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the party to admit responsibility for the failings of the NKVD: he should have unearthed the conspiracies in 1931 and thus saved Kirov’s life; he had ignored Stalin’s directions; his departments had lacked agents. Iagoda was bawled out by Ezhov and mocked by a menacing newcomer, Lavrenti Beria, who had the hall in uproar when he called Iagoda’s NKVD a “company for producing worsted wool.” In desperation, Iagoda blamed his subordinates—Molchanov, for example, was a traitor—and the White Sea canal, which had distracted him from police work. More of Stalin’s jackals made frenzied attacks. Stalin joined in, as did his brother-in-law, Stanislav Redens.

Iagoda had to endure worse harassment the following morning, when he could only get in a few phrases of disavowal. He and Agranov blamed each other. Zakovsky, a Latvian Jew who had taken over the Leningrad NKVD after Kirov’s murder and who was almost the only one of Menzhinsky’s appointees brutal enough to be acceptable to Ezhov, fell upon Iagoda, who was reproached for quarreling with Efim Evdokimov, the GPU chief of the north Caucasus. Finally Evdokimov assessed Iagoda’s performance:

A rotten, non-party speech . . . Iagoda, we know you’re no lamb. . . . Thank God, I know Iagoda well. It’s he who cultivated a very odd choice of people; I ask, now you Iagoda were once my boss, what help did I get from you? . . . Stop blustering, you never gave me help in my work. . . . Iagoda, you were in bed with Rykov and his influence on you shows. . . . Iagoda must be made to answer. And we must think hard about whether he should remain in the Central Committee.⁴⁹

The only words in Iagoda’s defense came from Litvinov, commissar for foreign affairs, who praised, albeit faintly, NKVD counterintelligence, and from Vyshinsky, who acknowledged Iagoda’s “objective material” for trying foreign wreckers. Ezhov finished off, claiming that if he and Stalin hadn’t threatened to “smash Iagoda’s face in,” Kirov’s murderers would not have been caught. The session ended by condemning NKVD slackness. It was the worst day in Iagoda’s life but even worse was to come.

On March 28, 1937, Frinovsky, whom Ezhov had made his deputy, searched Iagoda’s dacha. Iagoda was picked up the next day at his Moscow apartment. He was taken to the Lubianka and the apartment was ransacked for a week by five officers. Little public action had to be taken. There were no paintings or statues of Iagoda and very few photographs to destroy; he was responsible for only one publication, The White Sea–Baltic Canal, which was pulped; three sites named after him—a railway bridge in the Far East, a training school for frontier guards, and a commune—were renamed. When Trotsky was expelled and Zinoviev arrested, dozens of towns changed names, millions of books were withdrawn, photographs airbrushed, paintings retouched. Iagoda went down with barely a ripple.

Under interrogation, Iagoda admitted his sympathies for Bukharin and Rykov and his distress at Stalin’s policies; he confessed to furnishing friends’ dachas using over a million rubles of NKVD funds. But a month passed and he still would not admit espionage and counterrevolution, nor did the interrogators find jewelry thought to have passed through his hands. When Ezhov complained of Iagoda’s recalcitrance, Stalin suggested that Efim Evdokimov, who had not been an NKVD employee for three years, should take over the interrogation. Evdokimov sat opposite Iagoda—now a pathetic figure, his hands handcuffed behind his back, his trousers falling down—downed a vodka, rolled up his sleeves to show his apelike biceps, asked, “Well, international spy, you’re not confessing?” and boxed his former chief’s ears.

From this point truth blends with fiction in Iagoda’s statements. ⁵⁰ He seems to have seen the pointlessness of holding back and confessed to attempting to overthrow the state with the help of the Kremlin guard and the military, revelations which gave Stalin and Ezhov plenty of material for future use. He said he had poisoned, with the help of Dr. Levin, the NKVD doctor, virtually everyone he knew who had died in the last four years: Menzhinsky, Gorky, Gorky’s son, Kuibyshev. He even confessed to impregnating Ezhov’s office with mercury vapor. The only accusations he balked at—even though the promise of his life was dangled in front of him—were spying and murdering Kirov. As he cleverly declared at his trial, “If I were a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services.”

Some of Iagoda’s statements ring true. He called himself a skeptic, “wearing a mask, but with no program,” who had followed Stalin rather than Trotsky out of calculation not conviction. As Iagoda’s interrogation proceeded, a second show trial of Zinovievites took place, the Red Army’s marshals, generals, and colonels were purged, and the arrests of Bukharin and his supporters provided more material, some true, most false, to force Iagoda into total self-incrimination. To Iagoda’s credit, he incriminated first himself, then others who were already arrested and doomed, and avoided saying evil of those who might yet be at liberty.

The most hurtful evidence against Iagoda came on May 17 in a letter from his own brother-in-law, Leopold Averbakh, to Ezhov:

Iagoda directly propelled us into maximum involvement in the struggle against Gorky. . . . Iagoda several times talked of Voroshilov’s invariably bad view of him, and he did so in a tone of outright hatred. . . . In private conversation with Gorky you could feel that the topic of conversation was beyond Iagoda. . . . Iagoda needed Gorky as a possible weapon in political games. . . . I am writing this statement to you since I am obliged to reveal to the utmost and in every way the utterly loathsome personality of Iagoda and everything I know of his inimical activity . . . so that the party can cauterize this gangrene fully and wholly and cleanse Soviet air of this scum and stench.

This mendacious letter bought Averbakh perhaps a year’s extra life.

For some months Iagoda was left to stew in his cell. In December, the NKVD went for him again, this time to make him admit that he had conspired to poison Max Peshkov, his mistress’s husband, and then Gorky himself. Iagoda’s confession was ambiguous: he had encouraged Kriuchkov to make Max drink and to take him for drives in an open car, to let him sleep out on dew-covered benches, and then let Dr. Levin treat the resulting pneumonia with lethal medicine. Iagoda’s doctors had likewise hastened Menzhinsky’s end, and he had hurried both Gorky and Kuibyshev to their deaths—the former dying from the effects of his return to Moscow from the warm Crimea, the latter by making a trip to central Asia. When the doctors were confronted by the interrogator with Iagoda, they admitted guilt but could not say how they had finished off their patients. They said that Iagoda would have killed them had they disobeyed him.⁵¹

Interrogation was over. Early in 1938 one of Averbakh’s associates, the playwright Vladimir Kirshon, was put in Iagoda’s cell as a stool pigeon. Kirshon reported Iagoda’s conversations to Major Aleksandr Zhurbenko, one of Ezhov’s short-lived star interrogators. Not for a decade had Iagoda spoken so sincerely. Iagoda wanted only to know what had happened to his wife, Ida, to his mistress, Timosha, and to his eight-year-old son, Genrikh. He expected death any day. He denied poisoning Gorky and his son, not just because he was innocent but because of the hurt it would cause Timosha. As he was to die anyway he was inclined to deny everything, were it not that “this would play into the hands of counterrevolution.” He could endure the trial if he were allowed to speak to Ida; he dreamed of dying before the trial; he felt mentally ill. He wept constantly, he fought for his breath.⁵² Iagoda even fumbled for his Judaic roots. An NKVD guard reports him exclaiming, “There is a God. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude, but I have broken God’s commandments ten thousand times and this is my punishment.”

On March 9, 1938, Iagoda took the stand at the last of Stalin’s three great show trials. As Trotsky commented, if Goebbels had admitted that he was the agent of the pope, he would have astonished the world less than Iagoda’s indictment as the agent of Trotsky. Only Bukharin and Iagoda dared to hint to the public that the trial was a sham. Iagoda refused to elaborate on his role in the death of Gorky’s son. As for Kirov’s death, he asserted that he was as a matter of principle against such terrorism. Any version that Vyshinsky proffered, he parried, saying, “It wasn’t like that, but it doesn’t matter.” He claimed to have seen Dr. Kazakov, allegedly his agent in killing Menzhinsky, for the first time in court. Iagoda called Dr. Levin’s and Kriuchkov’s incriminating evidence “all lies.” Vyshinsky did not press Iagoda, a man who knew how little Stalin’s promises meant and who had nothing to lose. “You can put pressure on me, but don’t go too far. I shall say everything I want to. But don’t go too far.”

At this point there was an interval, after which Iagoda looked as if he had been beaten. “He read his next statement from a piece of paper, as if he was reading it for the first time,” an eyewitness remarked. Iagoda admitted everything except killing Max Peshkov and spying for half a dozen foreign states. His last word was a plea to be allowed to work as a laborer on one of his canals. On March 13, 1938, he was sentenced to death and shot two days later. In July Iagoda’s wife was sentenced to eight years in the camps, and condemned to death a year later. His sister Lili was first exiled to Astrakhan and jailed, then shot. The sister closest to Iagoda, Rozalia, got eight years, then another two, and died in the camps in 1948. One sister, Taisa, survived; in 1966 she asked in vain for Iagoda’s sentence to be quashed.

Iagoda’s father had written to Stalin:

Many happy years of our life during the revolution have now had a pall cast over them by the very serious crime committed against the party and the country by the only son we still have living—G. G. Iagoda. . . . Instead of justifying the trust placed in him, he became an enemy of the people, for which he must bear the punishment he merits. . . . I am now 78. I am half blind and incapable of working. I have tried to bring up my children in the spirit of devotion to the party and revolution. What words can convey all the weight of the blow that has struck me and my 73-year-old wife, thanks to the crime our last son has committed? . . . We consider it essential to tell you that in his personal life for the last ten years he has been very far from his parents and we cannot have any sympathy for him, nor can we be held responsible, all the less since we have had nothing to do with his deeds. We old people ask you to see that we can be assured of a chance to live out our life, now so short, in our happy Soviet country, for we find ourselves in difficult moral and material circumstances, with no means of existence (we receive no pension). We ask you to protect us, sick old people, from various oppressions by the house administration and the district council, who have begun to take over our apartment and are clearly preparing other measures against us. And this evening, June 26, when we have just got down to writing this letter, we have been ordered to leave Moscow within five days together with several of our daughters. This repressive measure against us seems unmerited and we call upon your sense of justice, knowing your profound wisdom and humanity....⁵³

Deported 800 miles south to Astrakhan, Iagoda’s parents were then arrested. His father died within a week of arriving in the camps, his mother shortly afterward. Timosha Peshkova was left untouched, and lived until 1988. Of Iagoda’s kin, only little Genrikh survived. Two women in the orphanage where he was placed took pity on him and gave him a new surname, under which the Iagoda family line still lives on.