1. Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda 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.
20 Facts About Genrikh Yagoda
1. 2.
Genrikh Yagoda was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937.
3.
Genrikh Yagoda said he joined the Bolsheviks in Nizhny Novgorod at the age of 16 or 17 and was arrested and sent into exile in 1911.
4.
When Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union's entire rural population were to be forced onto collective farms, Genrikh Yagoda is reputed to have sympathised with Bukharin and Rykov, his opponents on the right of the communist party.
5.
Genrikh Yagoda continued to be an effective head of the OGPU until July 1931, when the Old Bolshevik Ivan Akulov was appointed First Deputy Chairman, and Genrikh Yagoda was demoted to the post of Second Deputy.
6.
Genrikh Yagoda greatly expanded the use of prison labor to assist with the building of the Berezniki Works chemical plant and other projects.
7.
Genrikh Yagoda had founded a secret poison laboratory of OGPU that was at Stalin's disposal.
8.
Genrikh Yagoda had been cultivating Gorky as a potentially useful contact since 1928 and employed Gorky's secretary, Pyotr Kryuchkov, as a spy.
9.
One day in 1932, Genrikh Yagoda handed his valuable spy $4,000 to buy a car.
10.
Genrikh Yagoda was in charge of investigating the Kirov assassination.
11.
Genrikh Yagoda then worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, which resulted in prosecution and subsequent execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev in August 1936, beginning the Great Purge.
12.
Genrikh Yagoda may have found out about it only in 1936, or he knew about its activities for some time but covered it up because of his sympathies to the opposition.
13.
Genrikh Yagoda [Yagoda] was removed from the NKVD, and we lost a strong link in our opposition intelligence service.
14.
Genrikh Yagoda was demoted to the post of People's Commissar for Communications of the USSR.
15.
Genrikh Yagoda was accused of poisoning Maxim Gorky and his son.
16.
Genrikh Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty-One in March 1938.
17.
Genrikh Yagoda denied he was a spy, but admitted most other charges.
18.
Genrikh Yagoda was the only defendant not to be posthumously rehabilitated.
19.
Genrikh Yagoda was photographed before her execution, as was normal for condemned prisoners.
20.
Genrikh Yagoda's wife was Ida Averbakh, one of whose uncles, Yakov Sverdlov, was a prominent Bolshevik, and another, Zinovy Peshkov, was the adopted son of the writer Maxim Gorky.