Genrich Grigoryevich Jagoda

Genrich Grigoryevich Jagoda 1936

Genrich Grigorjewitsch Jagoda ( Russian Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да , scientific transliteration Genrich Grigor'evič Jagoda , originally Jenoch Gerschenowitsch Jehuda ; * 7 November ^July / 19 November  1891 ^greg. In Rybinsk . † around March 15, 1938 ; † around 15 March 1938 ) Moscow ) was the head of the Soviet Interior Ministry NKVD from 1934 to 1936, which was formed under his leadership from the merger of the secret police OGPU with the previous People's Commissariat of the Interior NKVD.

Life

Pre-revolutionary life

Genrich Jagoda's index card from the holdings of the Tsarist secret police Okhrana (1912, Russian State Archives)

Genrich Grigorjewitsch Jagoda was the son of a Jewish printer from the Russian part of the Polish aristocratic republic , who had only recently moved to the heart of the Russian Empire and who also produced forged documents for Russian revolutionaries . Jagoda began an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in Nizhny Novgorod before the October Revolution and became a member of an anarchist group there. When he wanted to get explosives for these , he was arrested in 1912 and exiled to Siberia for two years , but was given an amnesty in 1913. Then he went to St. Petersburg and worked there as an insurance employee in the Putilov works . In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian army and took part in the First World War as a soldier , where he was wounded.

Revolution and rise

In 1917 he returned to Saint Petersburg after the February Revolution , joined the Bolsheviks (his date of accession was later dated back to 1907) and took part in the October Revolution . The influential revolutionary Yakov Sverdlov became his sponsor and recommended him for work in the Cheka and the Supreme Military Inspection, where he made first contacts with Lenin and Stalin . Jagoda became a member of this secret police under Felix Dzerzhinsky . He rose quickly in the hierarchy and in 1923 was second deputy chairman of the organization, which has now been renamed OGPU, after Vyacheslav Menschinsky . After Dzerzhinski's death in July 1926, he became deputy OGPU chairman.

Head of the OGPU

Prisoners building the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1931–1933). (Photo from the collection of the Regional Museum of the Republic of Karelia , Petrozavodsk)

When Menschinski became seriously ill in the late 1920s, Jagoda was de facto head of the OGPU. Jagoda, who was interested in literature, helped Stalin to bring the writer Maxim Gorky back from exile in Italy . This in turn enabled him and the OGPU to better control the remaining writers in the Soviet Union , who were now completely in line with the party leadership.

Jagoda was jointly responsible for the construction of the Soviet prison camp system GULAG , which was used for large construction projects, especially at the beginning of the 1930s. He was also involved in the extermination of the wealthier rural population , known as deculakization , from 1929 onwards. In 1931 he lost a power struggle against other deputy. OGPU chairwoman and was demoted to Menschinski's second deputy. From 1931 to 1933 he was responsible for the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal and then until 1934 for the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal . In both projects, tens of thousands of prisoners died due to poor working conditions. He received the Order of Lenin for his achievements in building the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal . Together with Maxim Gorki, he was one of the co-authors of a book on canal construction in which the work was presented in a considerably more elegant way.

In February 1933 Jagoda, together with the head of the Gulag Matwei Berman, developed a plan to deport one million people each to Western Siberia and Kazakhstan . The deportees, referred to as “socially harmful and declassified elements”, were supposed to open up barely populated areas there. The so-called “great plan” failed after just a few months with the tragedy of Nasino , in which thousands of cases of cannibalism were recorded due to the inadequate and poorly organized care of the deportees .

Leadership of the NKVD

Maxim Gorki and Genrich Jagoda (after November 1935, photo by the Russian State Archives)

In July 1934, two months after Menschinski's death, Yagoda became head of the OGPU, which he soon incorporated into the NKVD. After his promotion to head of the NKVD, Yagoda lost touch with reality to a large extent; he became more and more arrogant and brutal.

After the assassination of Sergei Kirov , a close confidante of Stalin in December 1934, he was in the initial stages of the Stalinist purge for the investigation of the murder case and the arrest and indictment of Lev Kamenev , Grigory Zinoviev , Ivan Smirnov and Grigory Evdokimov as exponents of the “conspiracy of the left opposition ”. In January 1935, the four were sentenced to prison terms for this murder. The communist press, here the Rundschau, wrote "that the so-called 'Moscow Center' [...] had directed the counter-revolutionary activity [...] of illegal groups of Zinoviev people".

He was responsible for holding the first of the Moscow show trials , which lasted from August 19 to 24, 1936 and resulted in the execution of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Evdokimov and twelve other defendants. The Rundschau stated: They were also "initiators and organizers of attacks [...] prepared for the lives of other leaders of the CPSU and the Soviet government." After the murder of Kirov, the pressure on Yagoda increased, conspiracies within the party and society uncover.

In order to finance foreign missions of the NKVD, Jagoda initiated the mass forgery of US dollar bills.

Descent and death

Unperson Genrich Jagoda: In the photo of the entrance area of ​​the White Sea Canal, the oversized portrait of Jagoda on the right was subsequently made illegible by Soviet censors (→ censorship in the Soviet Union )

Jagoda was replaced on September 26, 1936 by Nikolai Jeschow , who had already been placed at his side as an assistant during the trial and who had gathered incriminating material against him during this time. Yagoda was arrested in March 1937, followed by NKVD employees such as Vsevolod Balyzkyj , who had been close to him. After he had been brutally tortured for months under the guidance of his successor Yezhov as part of the " Great Terror " and had incriminated Stalin's bodyguard Karl Pauker , among other things , he was one of the main defendants in the third show trial from March 2 to 13, 1938. He made a difference himself from his co-defendants to the effect that he was detained separately from them. He was also accused of poisoning his predecessor Menschinsky and Maxim Gorky. The death sentence imposed on him was also carried out separately from the other defendants in the Lubyanka , which is why March 15 can not be regarded as the date of his death with certainty, and nothing is known about the whereabouts of the body. A large statue of Yagoda at the entrance to the White Sea Canal was blown up after his execution .

See also

• Ida Leonidowna Averbach (1905–1938), Jagoda's wife

Quotes

“A swarm followed Yagoda. Probably some of the heroes of our later reports on the White Sea Canal will have been among them, and their names were subsequently deleted from the poetic verses. "

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn : GULAG archipelago . Volume 1, p. 150: About the purges in the NKVD

“Jagoda [was] an arch criminal. It was not in the mind of this millionfold murderer that there would be no solidarity in the heart of the even higher murderer. He pleaded with him for mercy, confidently insistent, just as if Stalin were sitting here in the room: 'I turn to you! I built two canals for you! '"

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn : GULAG archipelago. Volume 1, p. 378: About the third Moscow show trial

“It was all the easier for the authors to agree with the words of Comrade Kogan about the Iron People's Commissar: 'Comrade Jagoda is our highest omnipresent head!' (That was one of the worst things that caused the book to fail. The praise for Genrich Jagoda and his picture were even torn from the only copy available to me; I had to look for this picture for a long time (Fig. 15)) "

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn : GULAG archipelago. Volume 2, p. 78: About the book "The Stalin-White Sea-Baltic Canal - the history of its establishment", Russian Беломоро-Балтийски канал имени Сталина; GIS 1934

"Jagoda ahead of us as a teacher, his gaze sharp and his hand tight."

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn : GULAG archipelago. Volume 2, p. 79: Propaganda song to encourage sewer workers

literature

• Simon Sebag-Montefiore : Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar. Button 2004; ISBN 1400042305 .
• Alexander Michailowitsch Orlow : The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. Random House 1953.
• Donald Rayfield: Stalin and his executioners. Blessing, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-89667-181-2 .
• Dagobert D. Runes: Despotism, a pictorial history of tyranny. Philosophical Library 1963.
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago. Rowohlt-Verlag 1978.
• Н. В. Петров, К. В. Скоркин (NW Petrow, KW Skorkin): Кто руководил НКВД, 1934–1941 - Справочник. (Who was in charge of the NKVD, 1934 to 1941 - directory); Swenja-Verlag 1999, ISBN 5-7870-0032-3 ( online ).
• А.Л. Литвин (AL Litwin): От анархо-коммунизма к ГУЛАГу: к биографии Генриха Ягоды (From anarchocommunism to Gulag: With a biography by Genrich Jagoda . Октябрьская революция. (The year 1917 and the fate of Russia and the world) pp. 299–314, Institute for Russian History РАН, Moscow 1998, ISBN 5805500078 .

Documentaries

• Episode 1933 - Genrich Jagoda of the documentary series Historical Chronicles by Nikolai Swanidze, production of the TV channel Rossiya 1 , 2006, main page of the documentaries (Russian).

Web links

Commons : Genrich Grigoryevich Jagoda  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Brief biographical note on the website of the Russian domestic secret service FSB (Russian)
• Jagoda's Order No. 6123 of March 1, 1929 for the arrest of Warlam Tichonowitsch Shalamov (Russian)
• Excerpts from the book on the construction of the White Sea Canal on the website of the Dutch International Institute for Social History (IISG)
• CV , AZ Library (Russian)
• Newspaper article about Genrich Grigorjewitsch Jagoda in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Steffen Dietzsch: Bukharin, Nikolai Iwanowitsch, Karl Radek et al. , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (Eds.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials , Online, as of September 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ За что расстреляли "отца ГУЛАГа" Генриха Ягоду. Retrieved February 3, 2019 (ru-RU). 
2. ↑ Краткие биографии и послужные списки руководящих работников НКВД. Retrieved February 3, 2019 . 
3. ^ Norman Polmar, Thomas B. Allen: Spy Book - The Encyclopedia of Espionage. Greenhill Books, London 1997, ISBN 1-85367-278-5 .
4. ↑ ^{a b} Rundschau about politics, economics and the labor movement, year 1936, p. 1589.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Vronskaya, Chuguev: A Biographical Dictionary of the Soviet Union. KG Saur Verlag, London 1989, ISBN 0-86291-470-1 .
6. ↑ Simon Sebag Montefiore : Stalin - At the court of the Red Tsar. 2nd edition, Frankfurt 2007, p. 252.