Yagoda Genrikh Grigorievich (at birth: Enoch Gershonovich Yehuda) (born on November 7 (19), 1891 - death on March 15, 1938) - People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR (1934-1936), Soviet statesman and politician, one of the main leaders of the Soviet state security organs (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD) and the organizer of Stalin's repressions.
Origin. early years
Genrikh Yagoda was born on November 20, 1891 in Rybinsk into a Jewish craft family. His father, Gershon Fishelevich Yagoda, was a printer and engraver. Besides Enoch, the family had 2 sons and 5 daughters. Yagoda's father was a cousin of Mikhail Izrailevich Sverdlov, the father of Yakov Sverdlov, who lived in Nizhny Novgorod. Soon after the birth of Enoch, the family moved to Nizhny Novgorod, where his father worked as an apprentice for printers.
The family was associated with the Social Democrats. 1904 - Gershon Yagoda agreed that an underground printing house of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the RSDLP (b) was placed in his apartment. Young Enoch took part in the work of an underground printing house. 1905, December - during the December armed uprising in Sormovo, a workers' settlement near Nizhny Novgorod, the elder brother Mikhail died.
According to intelligence information of the Moscow Security Department, in 1907-1908. belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod group of communist anarchists. 1911 - Genrikh Yagoda was instructed to contact a Moscow group of anarchists for a joint bank robbery.
Summer 1912 - Yagoda was detained in Moscow: as a Jew, he had no right to live in Moscow and settled there using a forged passport, issued in the name of a certain Galushkin, with his sister Rosa, a member of the Anarchist Party. The court passed a sentence, two years of exile in Simbirsk, where the grandfather had his own house. The amnesty on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty reduced the term of exile by a year. This made it possible for Henry in the summer of 1913 not only to return from exile, but also to settle in St. Petersburg. To do this, he had a chance to convert to Orthodoxy and formally renounce Judaism.
1915 - Genrikh Yagoda was drafted into the army and sent to the battlefields of the First World War. He rose to the rank of corporal. In the fall of 1916 he was wounded.
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Registration card of G. Yagoda, 1912.
Revolutionary activity
Took part in the October Revolution in Petrograd.
From November 1917 to April 1918, he was the executive editor of the newspaper Peasant Poorota.
From 1918 he worked in the Petrograd Cheka. 1918-1919 - An employee of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army. 1919 - under the patronage of Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky was transferred to Moscow.
1919-1920 - Member of the board of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade. 1920 - Member of the Presidium of the Cheka, then a member of the board of the GPU. From September 1923 - the second deputy chairman of the OGPU, from July 1926 - the first. The chairman was Menzhinsky, who was often ill, and Yagoda actually headed the OGPU.
In the internal party struggle, he supported Stalin. Genrikh Grigorievich confidently made a brilliant career. But here are the data of the former employee of the personal security of the "leader of the peoples", the former military commandant of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater, in those days the main venue for all party congresses and important events of the Soviet government, the old Chekist A. Rybin - according to Rybin, the power-hungry Yagoda poisoned the chairman of the OGPU Menzhinsky in order to take his place yourself. Menzhinsky died in 1934. In July of the same year, by decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, the state security organs became part of the NKVD of the USSR, which was entrusted to Yagoda.
Yagoda with his wife Ida Averbakh, September 30, 1922.
Under the leadership of Yagoda, the GULAG (General Directorate of Forced Labor Camps) was established, and the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal by prisoners began. In honor of his merits in organizing camp construction projects, a special monument was even erected at the last gateway of the White Sea-Baltic Canal in the form of a 30-meter five-pointed star, inside which was a giant bronze bust of Yagoda. In the early 1930s, approximately 200,000 people were held in the Gulag. In total, over the years of the existence of the GULAG system, 15-18 million people have passed through it. Of these, about 1.5 million died in the camps.
Genrikh Grigorievich officially bore the title of "the first initiator, organizer and ideological leader of the socialist industry of the taiga and the North." 1935 - Yagoda was the first to be awarded the title of General Commissioner of State Security.
He took an active part in organizing trials over the "killers" of Kirov and the "Kremlin case". 1936, August - the demonstration First Moscow trial against Kamenev and Zinoviev took place.
Maxim Gorky and G. Yagoda.
Arrest
1936, September - Berry's decline begins. He was removed from the post of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, who was replaced by the main "hero" of the Great Terror N. Yezhov, and Yagoda was appointed People's Commissar of Communications. 1937, April - removed from this post, expelled from the CPSU (b). April 4 - the central newspapers of the Soviet Union published an official message signed by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR Kalinin, which said: “In view of the discovered criminal crimes, People's Commissar of Communications G. G. Yagody Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decides to transfer the case to the investigating authorities. 1937, April 5 - was arrested. During a search in Yagoda's house, they found a lot of pornographic objects, women's clothing and even a rubber phallus.
Initially, Yagoda was accused of committing "anti-state and criminal crimes", then he was also accused of "ties with Trotsky, Bukharin and Rykov, organizing a Trotskyist-fascist conspiracy in the NKVD, preparing an assassination attempt on Stalin and Yezhov, preparing a coup and intervention." Genrikh Grigorievich was accused that Menzhinsky was killed as a result of improper treatment on his orders on the instructions of the Pravotrotskyist bloc.
His wife Ida Averbakh (Sverdlov's niece) was dismissed from the prosecutor's office and on June 9, 1937, was arrested "as a member of the family of a convicted NKVD of the USSR." Together with her mother and 7-year-old son, she was sent into exile in Orenburg for a period of 5 years, and later shot.
1938, February - Yagoda appeared at the Third Moscow Trial as one of the main accused. To the accusation of espionage, he answered: “No, I do not plead guilty to this. If I were a spy, I assure you that dozens of states would have to disband their intelligence services."
To the question of the state prosecutor Vyshinsky what he regrets, Yagoda replied: "I am very sorry … I am very sorry that when I could do this, I did not shoot you all."
G. Yagoda, A. Egorov, K. Voroshilov, M. Tukhachevsky and J. Gamarnik.
Firing squad
In the last word, Yagoda admitted his guilt, but at the same time declared that he had never been a member of the leadership of the “Pravotrotskyist bloc”. According to the defendant, he was only informed about the decisions of the center and demanded their strict execution.
Concluding his last performance in his life, he uttered a significant phrase:
“Citizens of the judge! I was the leader of the greatest construction projects - canals. Now these channels are a decoration of our time. I dare not ask to go to work there, at least as one performing the most difficult jobs … “But even there there was no place for him. At dawn on March 13, 1938, the court pronounced its verdict. Defendant Genrikh Yagoda was found guilty and sentenced to capital punishment, subject to execution.
The last attempt to grasp at straws was a petition for pardon, in which Yagoda wrote: “My guilt before my homeland is great. Don't redeem her in any way. It's hard to die. Before all the people and the party I kneel and ask you to have mercy on me, keeping me alive."
The request was rejected by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The verdict was carried out in the basement of the same large house on Lubyanka, where the convict once felt like a sovereign master …
2015, April - The Russian Supreme Court refused to rehabilitate him, citing numerous crimes he had committed.