Genrikh yagoda biography of donald
•
Gulag history an ‘unhealed wound’ as Russia takes authoritarian turn
Genrikh Yagoda surely enjoyed the perks of being a senior secret policeman under Josef Stalin, including the large wooden dacha that was especially built for him in the peaceful forest of Kommunarka, on the southern edge of Moscow.
Perhaps Yagoda saw it as a reward for overseeing the execution of Stalin’s most prominent potential rivals and the mass arrests that rapidly swelled the Soviet Union’s Gulag prison camp system, and for his readiness to work thousands of inmates to death building the megalomaniacal White Sea-Baltic Canal.
In 1934 he was made head of the NKVD, Stalin’s interior ministry, but just two years later, with the dictator’s paranoia deepening, the Great Terror that Yagoda helped to unleash arrived at his own door.
Now he entered the hell into which he had hurled so many others: sudden demotion, arrest and outlandish charges of spying, then torture, a show trial and the inevitable verdict
•
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda
(b. Lódź in Russian Poland, 1891; d. Moscow, 15 Mar. 1938)
Chairman of the NKVD 1934–6 Yagoda was the son of a Jewish carpenter. After secondary education he became a statistician. He worked for the father of Sverdlov and married into the Sverdlov family. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1907 and was imprisoned for two years in 1911. He served in the army from 1915 to 1917 and helped organize the Red Guard in Petrograd in 1917. Yagoda served in the Cheka in the Civil War as well as holding some administrative posts. Dzerzhinsky appointed him second deputy chairman of the GPU (secret police) in 1923, and he became deputy head of the GPU in 1926, serving under Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. As Menzhinsky's health declined after 1929, Yagoda was effectively in control of the secret police. He disapproved of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture though the secret police were closely involved in its implementation. From July 1934 to September 1936 he was chairman
•
The Stalin we hardly knew
Stalin is in the air. The Medvedev brothers, Roy and Zhores, neither of whom fared especially well under Soviet communism, have jointly written a revisionist work, “The Unknown Stalin.” Just published in English, it depicts him as intelligent, patriotic and a better military leader than most previous biographies have. A few years back, I tried my grabb at the dictator’s psychology in a novel. This spring, Russian television plans a major special on the private life of Josef Stalin. Now Simon Sebag Montefiore weighs in with a nearly 800-page volume.
Why all the interest? It’s been a little more than 50 years since Stalin died in 1953, the half-century mark being always a convenient point to look back and sum up. And it’s already been 13 years since the house that Stalin built, the USSR, collapsed and vanished. We now have a perspective that was impossible as long as the Soviet Union was a going concern. Most important, some of the secret archives have been