Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (Генрих Григорьевич Ягода) (1891 - March 15, 1938) was the head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, from 1934 to 1936.

He was born in Lodz, Poland, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, he rose through the ranks of the Cheka (the NKVD's predecessor), spending time overseeing forced labor at Soviet labor camps and serving as a lieutenant to secret police chief Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. In 1934, after the death of both Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, Yagoda was appointed People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, or head of the secret police, by Joseph Stalin.

Yagoda was notoriously decadent, indulging in vices such as gambling and womanizing (see Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar [1] (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400042305/qid=1093899604/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-6075295-8379201?v=glance&s=books)). He was also adept at killing and may have been involved with both the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, who was poisoned, and Sergei Kirov, who was shot in 1934. (Many historians believe that both of these murders were ordered by Stalin.)

In late 1936, Yagoda oversaw the first phase of the Great Purge, in which large numbers of alleged conspirators, spies and "wreckers" were arrested and sentenced under the notorious Article 58. He was, however, soon replaced by his deputy, Nikolai Yezhov, who oversaw the height of the purges. In March of 1938 Yagoda himself was arrested and, in the Trial of the Twenty One, found guilty of treason and conspiring against the government. He was executed in Moscow in 1938.