It was none other than the former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Henrich Yagoda! A year and a half ago, on a night in August 1936, this was the same Yagoda who, together with Yerev, went to the basement of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to “execute” Zinoviev, Kamenev and others who had been sentenced to death in the first Moscow trial. And now, by Stalin’s order, Yagoda himself was put in the dock as a participant in the same conspiracy, as a “co-accused” of the old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov, who had been tortured and shot by him!
Could there be anything more bizarre and absurd in the world? Probably, Stalin used all his genius for creating false and unjust cases in the first and second trials, so his “creative” imagination has now disappeared ……
This phenomenon is indeed absurd to the superficial observer, but a realistic explanation of this absurdity reveals one of the central secrets of the three Moscow trials. The problem is that Stalin’s “foolish” approach was by no means ill-considered; on the contrary, he was particularly perceptive and cunning whenever it came to political intrigue. The reason why he seemed so “stupid” this Time was simply that he could not avoid some special difficulties, which, in fact, all forgers encounter when their forgeries reveal themselves.
It was absurd and ridiculous to present Yagoda as an accomplice of Zinoviev and Kamenev, but in this way Stalin was able to get rid of another crime he had committed long ago – the murder of Kirov, which, you know, was not clean, and many traces pointed directly to him – Stalin. -Stalin.
As I said earlier, the first morning after Kirov’s murder, Stalin left all his work and went to Leningrad, not to investigate the case, but to check whether all the measures taken to cover up the truth had been implemented. When he found out that the “hand of the NKVD” was clearly exposed in the case, he took urgent measures to eliminate the traces: he immediately ordered the shooting of the direct assassins of Kirov and the secret execution of all those who knew that the NKVD had interfered in the case.
Stalin tried to conceal Kirov’s murder forever, but he missed an important fact: when Kirov was killed in the corridor, none of his personal guards was present, which could not but cause great shock and suspicion among the other members of the State Party Committee. Moreover, Kirov’s deputies knew that two weeks before Kirov’s murder, the murderer Nikolaev had been caught with a pistol in his possession entering the Smolny Palace. Naturally they had to wonder: who had given the pass to this murderer again two weeks later?
The most suspicious thing, and the one that proves that Kirov was “suppressed” by his own regime, is the secret order that Stalin gave to Agranov and Mironov: the immediate purging of Leningrad of “Kirovists”. As a result, hundreds of outstanding cadres were summoned to the Leningrad NKVD. The backbone of Leningrad’s party and economic enterprises during Kirov’s lifetime was ordered to leave Moscow within a week and go to new jobs in the Urals and Siberia.
In the history of the Soviet state. For the first time in the history of the Soviet state, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, instead of the party organization, reassigned the party cadres to their jobs. Since the deadline for departure was set so short, many factory directors or managers simply did not have time to hand over their jobs. All cadres who tried to resist or asked for some kind of explanation. The answer was “You have been in Leningrad too long”. In the summer of 1935, more than 3,500 cadres were expelled from Leningrad in this way. This was very much like the campaign to purge the cities of “Zinovievists” that had been carried out a few years earlier after the defeat of the Zinoviev opposition. No wonder there were rumors in the party that Kirov tried to organize a new opposition, but was eliminated at the first sign of it.
Moreover, the staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs knew more than they should have about the truth of Kirov’s murder, and it was they who passed on to the Central Committee organs the information that the Leningrad NKVD had intervened in the assassination.
Party members who knew the inside story knew that Yagoda, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, was in fact a puppet and that the real master of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was Stalin. These party members naturally came to the conclusion (or at least guessed) that since the NKVD was involved in the assassination of Kirov, it meant that it was done at Stalin’s behest.
The inside story of Kirov’s murder was no longer basically a secret in the party, a situation that Stalin learned about relatively late: Yagoda, who was responsible for providing him with information (including various rumors and people’s emotions), had been afraid to report the situation. Yagoda’s ears kept recalling the words that Stalin had scolded him for in Leningrad. Although some of the big names in the Central Committee gradually heard the truth about Kirov’s case, they did not speak to Stalin in time: in that case, they would have voluntarily classified themselves as “too well informed”.
In any case, by the time Stalin learned all this, it was already too late. It was too late to take tighter and more appropriate measures to cover up the truth. He had only one way left: to admit publicly that Kirov had died at the hands of the NKVD, but to put all the blame on Yagoda; since in the two previous Moscow trials the responsibility for Kirov’s murder had been laid on the shoulders of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yagoda, then, could now only be their co-accused. Thus, the “instinct” of any forger to cover up the traces and shift the blame forced Stalin to combine two incompatible statements into one, and thus this nonsense emerged: Yagoda, the NKVD member who organized the first Moscow trial and shot Zinoviev and Kamenev, was in fact his accomplice in these murders. The victims’ accomplices.
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