Word: yagoda
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...friends of Lenin would not think of a contest for personal power. . . For [them] to confess that they had taken part in a struggle for power was to say that they were the victims of a struggle for personal power. . . Their message was for history. . .It deceived Henry Yagoda who was entrusted to prepare the confessions. . . . But the Khozyain was not deceived. . . . He, too, is an Old Bolshevik. . . . We know that he acted immediately because next day the trial was all confusion and the day after that . . . the Old Bolsheviks had become Traitors...
Gregor, another member of the group, had risen in the NKVD as Yagoda's interrogator and a leader in the Terror. A massive and subtle peasant, Gregor concedes that 7,000,000 enemies of the people were purged. "All gondevay," says Mitka gaily. And Gregor, too, as one of the few witnesses still alive, knows he will soon be "gondevay...
Even the charge that Stalin poisoned Lenin is linked to the fact that during the Purge trials Stalin convicted his NKVD chief, Henry Yagoda, of poisoning Novelist Maxim Gorky and Soviet Control Commission Chairman Valerian Kuibyshev (as if President Truman were to charge FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover with poisoning the late Will Rogers and Chester Bowles). And two facts are indisputable: 1) a whole generation of Russian Communists was officially liquidated in circumstances that may gratify mankind's sense of poetic justice, but outrages its sense of human justice; 2) Trotsky was assassinated...