Word: yagoda
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...housed the All-Russian Insurance Co. Behind the headquarters is the most celebrated KGB structure, Lubyanka Prison, through which tens of thousands of Soviet citizens have passed on their way to concentration camps or execution. These probably included three of Stalin's own secret police chiefs-Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria-who were shot following their fall from power. The KGB has administrative offices in every major center, and KGB officers occupy key posts in the Soviet armed forces and the regular police, as well as in factories, government offices, universities and most other major Soviet institutions...
...More violent than Maxim Gorky's own death in August 1936. At first Moscow reported the old (68) man's death as natural, but in the vast purge trials two years later, the Kremlin charged NKVD Chief Genrikh Yagoda with hastening Gorky's end (enforced exposure to grippe, influenza and the weather) and masterminding the killing of Gorky's son. Gouzenko believes Yagoda killed Gorky on Stalin's orders...
...successors, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, and Yezhov, were either political nonentities or scapegoats in purges. Beria's rise, the author believes, was evidence of Stalin's tutelage rather than a boost from NKVD leadership...
...become almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive police organization the world has ever known...
...Such an apparatus was already created in the Orgburo and the Party Control Commission, by which Stalin organized himself into power after Lenin's death, and which later became a department of personnel in the Kremlin. Only such an apparatus could have arrested and destroyed former police chief Yagoda. From being dossier clerk to Yezhov, the young Malenkov is said to have graduated to secretarial head of this tidy personnel department. He may well have inherited the apparatus after Stalin's death...