Jakow Saulowitsch Agranow

Agranov (far right) with other delegates during the XVII. CPSU party congress in Moscow

Yakov Agranov (actually Jankel Schmajewitsch Sorenson ) ( Russian Яков Саулович Агранов (Янкель Шмаевич Соренсон) ; born September 30, ^jul. / 12. October  1893 ^greg. In Chechersk, Mogilev Governorate , Russian Empire (now Tschatschersk , Gomel Region , Belarus ); † August 1, 1938 in Moscow ) was a high-ranking Soviet secret service officer who was responsible, among other things, for monitoring Russian writers and other cultural workers. He was one of the main organizers of the Stalinist reprisals and eventually fell victim to the Great Terror himself .

Life

Jakow Saulowitsch Agranow was born as Yankel Schmajewitsch Sorenson in the village of Chechersk around 60 kilometers north of the district town of Gomel into a Jewish family ; his father owned a general store . He graduated from the four-class elementary school .

In 1912 he found a job as an accountant in Gomel , where he also joined the Social Revolutionaries . Three years later he switched to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1915 he was exiled to Siberia as an opponent of tsarist rule . There he met the banned Bolshevik Josef Stalin .

After his return from Siberia in 1917, the year of the revolution, Agranov was elected District Secretary of the Gomel RSDLP. There Stalin convinced him to switch to the Bolshevik camp. Agranov was appointed one of the secretaries of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , the new Russian government, in 1918 thanks to the protection of Lenin and Stalin . He was thus at a switching point of power in Moscow .

In 1919 the party leadership assigned him to the newly founded "Extraordinary Commission" (Russian abbreviated: Cheka ), the political secret police . In 1921 he was appointed to the operational management of the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky . In this capacity, he was involved in the suppression of the Kronstadt sailors' uprising , the Tambov peasant uprising and the uncovering of the alleged Taganzew conspiracy . Agranov had previously had the main defendants tortured, but then assured them in writing that they would be given mild punishment if they confessed to participating in the conspiracy. But several dozen of the accused were executed by firing squad. The writer Nikolai Gumiljow was also shot for participating in this conspiracy, which Russian historians believe was an invention of the Cheka to justify a blow against unpopular intellectuals .

In 1922, on behalf of Lenin, Agranov was involved in drawing up a list of the names of intellectuals who were deported abroad by ship, leaving their belongings behind . Among the passengers on this “ philosopher's ship ” were the philosophers Nikolai Berdjajew , Sergei Bulgakow , Simon Frank , Ivan Ilyin and Fedor Stepun .

From then on Agranov was also responsible for overseeing the writers. As part of this activity, he made friends with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pilnjak , and among his contributors were the couple Ossip and Lilja Brik , Mayakovsky's lover. Contemporary witnesses reported that Agranow was one of Lilja Brik's numerous lovers. He attended writers' meetings as an observer. He called himself “the writer's friend and protector”. He regularly invited writers to his home. In addition to the Briks, Mayakowski and Pilnjak, Isaak Babel and Vsevolod Ivanov were among his frequent guests . Contemporaries, however, described him as the " executioner of the Russian intelligentsia" and reported that he had personally participated in the torture of intellectuals imprisoned.

In 1931 he was promoted to the leadership of the secret police, which was now called OGPU . Two years later he became deputy OGPU chief under Vyacheslav Menschinsky . He led several cases against writers for allegedly "counter-revolutionary works", including against Nikolai Erdman , Ossip Mandelstam and Nikolai Kljujew . He also coordinated Maxim Gorki's surveillance .

Under Menschinski's successor Genrich Jagoda , Agranov remained at the post, the secret police was converted into a separate People's Commissariat with even greater powers and has been operating under the abbreviation NKVD since 1934 . In the same year, Agranov led the investigation into the Kirov murder in Leningrad . He was in direct contact with Stalin, who also directed him to an official apartment in the Kremlin . In 1936/37 he played a leading role in the preparations for the show trials against the former party leaders Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev and Martemjan Ryutin .

Agranov was recalled from the top of the NKVD in April 1937 and demoted to the position of NKVD head of the Saratov district . From there he wrote a letter to Stalin in which he proposed arresting Nadezhda Krupskaya , Lenin's widow, and Georgi Malenkov , a member of the Politburo . But Stalin had Agranov arrested instead. After a secret trial before the Military Tribunal of the USSR, which found him guilty of espionage and sentenced him to death , he was shot near Moscow on August 1, 1938 .

Afterlife

Two years after Stalin's death, Agranov's daughter applied for his rehabilitation in 1955 . The Supreme Military Prosecutor of the USSR retrospectively withdrew the allegation of espionage, but saw no reason to legally rehabilitate him posthumously because of Agranov's "systematic violation of socialist law". The then First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev described Agranov in his memoirs as an “honorable, calm, intelligent person”.

In 2001, Agranov's descendants repeated the request for rehabilitation. It was initially rejected, but then approved by the military prosecutor in January 2013. Eight months later, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation overturned the rehabilitation decision.

The Russian lawyer and publicist Arkadi Waksberg , who has evaluated Agranov's personal files in the NKVD archives, called him "a horrible figure who fits well into a psychological detective novel".

literature

• E. Makarevič, Jakov Agranov - čekist, prišedšij k intelligentam, in: Dialog , 7.2000, pp. 69–74.
• NV Petrov, KV Sorokin: Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941. Spravočnik. Ed. Memorial , Moscow 1999.
• Виталий Шенталинский

Web links

Commons : Yakov Agranov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} biographical information according to NV Petrov / KVSorokin: Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934-1941. Spravočnik. Edited by Memorial Society, Agranov Jakov (Jankel) Saulovič .
2. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg : Požar serca. Kogo ljubila Lili Brik. Moscow 2010, p. 99.
3. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg: Požar serca. Kogo ljubila Lili Brik. Moscow 2010, p. 311.
4. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 137-138.
5. ↑ Tagancevskij zagovor: k 90-letiju rerassekrečennogo dela svoboda.org ( Radio Svoboda ), November 8, 2011.
6. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg: Požar serca. Kogo ljubila Lili Brik. Moscow 2010, p. 100.
7. ↑ Vitali Chentalinski: Les surprises de la Loubianka. Nouvelles decouvertes in the archives of the KGB. Paris 1996, p. 170.
8. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg: Požar serca. Kogo ljubila Lili Brik. Moscow 2010, p. 166.
9. ↑ Aleksej Michajlov: Točka puli v konce. Moscow 1993, p. 193.
10. ↑ Vitali Chentalinski: Les surprises de la Loubianka. Nouvelles decouvertes in the archives of the KGB. Paris 1996, p. 196.
11. ^ Roman Gul ': Dzeržinskij (načalo terrora). Moscow 1991, pp. 29, 155.
12. ↑ Pis'mo zamestitelja predsedatelja OGPU Chronos - Istoričeskie istočniki.
13. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski: The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Translated from the Russian by Bernd Rullkötter. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, pp. 337, 399.
14. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski: The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Translated from the Russian by Bernd Rullkötter. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 477.
15. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg: Požar serca. Kogo ljubila Lili Brik. Moscow 2010, p. 305.
16. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Mozaika evrejskich sudeb. XX vek. Moscow 2008, p. 104.
17. ↑ Chronos - Biografičeskij ukazatel ' Agranov Jakov Saulovič
18. ↑ V Rossii reabilitirovali stalinskogo palača gazeta.ua, July 19, 2013.
19. ↑ NS Khrushchev: Vremya, ljudi, vlast ' . Vospominanija. Vol. I. Moscow 1999.
20. ↑ Verchovnyj sud otkazal v reabilitacii "palača russkoj intelligencii" ( Memento of the original from August 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
21. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, p. 137.
22. ↑ Осколки серебряного века. Окончание (Fragments of the Silver Century). In: Nowy Mir , 1998, No. 6.