Word: yagoda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...trials were only a fraction of the picture. The GPU reached out into every small town and village, arresting minor party members, doctors, engineers, professional men & women, beating them into confessions of sabotage and treachery. In 1938 Stalin called a halt, ordered a purge of the purgers. Henry Yagoda. GPU boss, was tried and shot and so were most of his operatives...
...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...