Genrikh Yagoda - Disgrace

Disgrace

Initially Yagoda became People's Commissar for Post and Telecommunications. However in March 1937, he was arrested on Stalin's orders. Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1907. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda trying to assassinate him. Yagoda's two Moscow apartments and his dacha contained 3,904 pornographic photos, 11 pornographic films, 165 pornographic pipes, one dildo and the two bullets that killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov took over the apartments. The charge of corruption at least was accurate. He had spent four million roubles decorating his three homes, boasting that his garden had '2,000 orchids and roses'.

During the trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen), Yagoda extracted confessions from the defendants, thus revealing inadvertently that the men did not have any political differences with Stalin, a fact the Soviet state prosecutor was unable to challenge. This infuriated Stalin, as it implied that he had eliminated the defendants solely to maintain his own political power. Yagoda had already earned Stalin's enmity eight years earlier, when he had expressed sympathy for Nikolai Bukharin, whom Stalin had forced from power.

As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing." Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty One in March 1938. Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself:

Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.

Yagoda was shot soon after the trial as were 3,000 of his NKVD supporters. His successor and former deputy Yezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and beat him for added humiliation just before his execution. Yezhov himself would suffer exactly the same treatment at the order of his successor and former deputy, Lavrenti Beria, before dying by the same executioner (NKVD Chief Executioner Vasili Blokhin) just two years later.