Yagoda, the powerful representative of Stalin’s dictatorship. The sudden appearance in the dock was enough to cause a national uproar, not to mention that Stalin also planted a large number of trumped-up charges on him, as was his custom. It was absurd enough that a man who led the Soviet counterintelligence apparatus for fifteen years was himself a foreign interloper, and what’s more, the executioner, who was known for his brutal suppression of Trotskyists, was himself a Trotskyist, and a die-hard Trotskyist agent.
It was this same Yagoda who, it was alleged, had sprayed poison on the walls of Yerov’s office in an attempt to poison the latter. It was this same Yagoda who kept a large group of doctors in order to “cure” those whom he did not dare to kill. These methods are reminiscent of the ancient legends of killing lovers with the scent of poisoned flowers and the smoke of poisoned candles.
However, one does not dare to dismiss this as a mere nightmare legend. The shorthand transcripts of court hearings and the large bulletins of shooting people in black on white turned these Nightmares into horrible realities. In these terrible realities, one can only conclude, which one never dares to forget: since such a domineering Yagoda was unceremoniously thrown into a prison, no one was safe in the Soviet Union; since even those who made the torture machine itself could not withstand the pressure of this machine, no one on death row could expect to be pardoned.
To be honest, Stalin would not have put Yagoda in the dock and charged him with Kirov’s murder if the situation had not forced him to do so. It would have been a great loss to Stalin to lose Yagoda and to deny him his unrivaled loyalty. For fifteen years, the two of them “worked together”, and Yagoda became almost Stalin’s “second self”. No one else knew Stalin better than Yagoda. Among all of Stalin’s close associates, Yagoda was the most “hard-working”, and Stalin trusted him more than any other person could.
It is with Stalin’s cunning and suspicious characteristics, learning the art of Stalin’s political intrigue, Yagoda can use malicious cobwebs to entangle Stalin’s potential political enemies, it is possible for Stalin to select a large group of unprincipled but very loyal accomplices.
As soon as Stalin became suspicious of the loyalty of any People’s Commissar or Politburo member. Yagoda would immediately send one of his reliable subordinates to be the deputy of the person under suspicion. It was for this purpose that Yagoda’s assistant Prokofiev became deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Heavy Industry and People’s Commissar of the State Supervisory Committee; two directors of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Llagan Lavov and Kishkin, were sent to the Ministry of Transport and Roads as assistants to People’s Commissar Lazar Kaganovich; Yagoda’s close associates, Hessian and Loganovsky, became deputy People’s Commissars of the Ministry of Foreign Trade; a deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Internal Affairs A deputy People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was placed at the side of the Comintern leader Pyatnitsky. The list of examples of Yagoda’s “sanding” of state bodies and party departments to strengthen Stalin’s dictatorship is endless.
Yagoda also had the task of collecting material for Stalin that would discredit the country’s leaders. No matter which leader was disobedient, Stalin would immediately put his hand in the bag of materials Yagoda had prepared for him. In these bags there were political materials, such as evidence that a national leader had been a spy in the Tsar’s police, as well as grim little reports that a leader’s wife had beaten the Family servant, or had quietly taken bread to church at Easter to spill holy water, and so on. Almost all the old Bolsheviks who followed Lenin added a few years to their party history when they filled out their party forms, and Yagoda certainly did not let this “sin” slip.
As for the affairs of the “leaders” in their personal lives, there is even more in the material bag. I had the honor to see such material about Gubishev, the deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars: he “stole” the wife of the chairman of the National Bank Council at a party and “hid” her in her room for three days, so that the Council of People’s Commissars had to cancel all the scheduled meetings during these three days. The meeting of the People’s Commissariat had to cancel all the scheduled meetings during these three days. In 1932 he drunkenly raped the thirteen-year-old daughter of the second secretary of the Moscow City Committee at a reception, and in 1927, on a business trip to Paris, he invited several staff members of the Soviet Embassy to take his wife to a nightclub and gave a large tip to the prostitutes there. Stalin, however, did not usually take such discreditable material lightly, except when he felt the need to discipline his senior aides.
Yagoda was Stalin’s eyes and ears. He installed very concealed bugs in the apartments and villas of almost every Politburo member and People’s Commissar, and reported the information he heard to Stalin in a timely and confidential manner. This was the reason why Stalin knew everything about his “close comrades” and even knew what they had accidentally revealed to their wives, children, brothers or friends. All this saved Stalin’s dictatorship from many mishaps.
Stalin, by the way, was “jealous” and was especially jealous of the establishment of personal relationships between his close friends or between members of the Politburo. If these people often met in groups of three or two in their free Time, Yagoda had to “keep his ears open” and report the situation to Stalin. Stalin believed that people who had personal friends always trusted each other, and this trust was likely to lead to the emergence of groups or factions opposed to him. Whenever this happened, Stalin always tried to sow discord among these newly established personal friends, and if this did not work and was detected, they were separated: one or two of them were transferred out of Moscow, or other “organizational measures” were taken.
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