Word: yagoda
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...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...
...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...
Least ominous explanation of the change is Comrade Yezhov's "ill health." He is known to be suffering from tuberculosis, overwork, and possibly from poisoning, if the fantastic accusation that his predecessor, Henry Yagoda, sprayed the executive office in the Commissariat for Internal Affairs with atomized mercuric poison be true. Comrade Yezhov will continue to be Commissar for Water Transportation, secretary to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and a member of the Politburo...