Word: genrikh
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Beria's benefactor, Kirov, had been sensationally murdered about this time, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of a political bloodbath. The instrument of the purge set off by the Kirov assassination was Genrikh Yagoda, a leather-capped roughneck who was then head of NKVD (successor to the Cheka). Yagoda did a thorough job and, in due time, he got his reward: he was charged, like thousands of his victims, with being an enemy of the people, imperialist spy, etc. Yagoda was the third of the great cops, following Felix Dzerzhinsky, the lean, cat-eyed Polish aristocrat...
...trial in Moscow in 1938 Genrikh Yagoda, hard-boiled head of the OGPU, said: "Citizen judges, I want to tell [you] how a man who spent thirty years in the party and worked a great deal, stumbled [and] fell ... I have committed heinous crimes. I realize this. It is hard to live after such crimes . . . But it is terrible to die with such a stigma. Even from behind bars I would like to see the further flour-ishings of the country I betrayed...
Menzhinsky's pupil and successor was Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda, a dull-faced man with a Chaplin mustache under whose regime developed the idea of putting prisoners to work. Even children arrested for "stealing Socialist property" were put into labor camps. The writer Maxim Gorky, a great admirer of Yagoda, glorified "this policy of education by teaching the truths of Socialism. . , ." Gorky added: "People whose historical duty it was to kill some beings in order to free others are martyrs. . . ." Two years later, Yagoda was accused, among other things, of having poisoned Gorky, and condemned to death...
...Beria's four predecessors in the C.H.E.K.A., Ogpit, N.K.V.D.: Felix Dzerzhinsky (1917-26), relieved and died of heart attack 1926; Viacheslav Menshinsky (1926-34), died in office 1934! Genrikh Yagoda (1934-36), relieved in 1936, shot for treason 1938; Nikolai Yezhov (1936-38), relieved in 1938, disappeared from public view in 1939, believed dead or insane...
...star prisoner last week was, however, no habitué of Moscow embassies. He was Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorevich Yagoda, who, next to Dictator Stalin, was for many years the most dread official in the Soviet Union, the head of Stalin's Secret Political Police. Harold Denny of the New York Times wrote of what the 250 spectators in the courtroom saw as they studied the star prisoner last week...