Leader
Genrikh Yagoda
Yenokh Gershevich Ieguda · 1891–1938
Photograph, 1936. Wikimedia Commons.
Yagoda industrialized the camps and the early purge, then became expendable the moment the terror needed a new face.
Origin and religion
Born Yenokh Gershevich Ieguda to a Jewish artisan family. Rose through the Cheka to people’s commissar of internal affairs. Shot on 15 March 1938.
Jewish family. Atheist. Head of the NKVD, then shot by it.
Responsibilities
- Deputy chairman of the OGPU
- People’s commissar of internal affairs (NKVD), 1934–1936
He oversaw the transformation of the OGPU into the NKVD, the use of prison labor on projects such as the White Sea–Baltic Canal (built over the bodies of “canal soldiers”), and the first wave of arrests after the Kirov murder. The propaganda book about the canal, with contributions solicited from writers, is a document of how the regime wanted slave labor to look.
The record
Arrested in 1937. He appeared in the March 1938 trial with Bukharin and was shot on 15 March 1938. His administration of the organs is the White Sea–Baltic Canal, the camp system he expanded, and the arrests after the Kirov murder.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.