Word: yagoda
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Yagoda, showpiece at a great public trial, confessed (after due treatment in Lubianka) that he had planned a "palace coup," but denied that he was an imperialist spy. In court he cracked: "If I had been a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services-there would have been no need for them to have maintained such a mass of spies." He was executed, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a madman who carried on the slaughter to the point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader...
...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...