Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Genrikh Iagoda came from a Polish Jewish family.⁶ He was born in 1891 in northern Russia, in Rybinsk where his family had just moved, nobody knows from where. In 1892, the Iagodas settled in Nizhni Novgorod, a city officially closed to Jews. Gershon, Genrikh’s father, was a cousin of Movsha, the father of Iakov Sverdlov. Gershon Iagoda was a printer, and ran, with Movsha Sverdlov, a shop making seals and stamps to authenticate fake documents for revolutionaries. Genrikh had two brothers and six sisters. The family was impoverished, but Genrikh completed six years of secondary school, probably paid for by his future father-in-law the merchant Leonid Averbakh, two hundred miles east in the city of Simbirsk. Iagoda’s spelling and general knowledge suggest he was a poor pupil.⁷

Leading Bolsheviks such as Dr. Nikolai Semashko, Lenin’s future commissar for health, frequented the Sverdlov–Iagoda printshop. Nizhni was the hometown of the then-notorious radical writer Maxim Gorky. In 1904 the printshop was raided and a visitor with manifestos and thirty kilos of type seized, but the Sverdlovs and Iagodas were left in peace, a fact which fed rumors that Genrikh may have been, at thirteen, a police spy.

Iagoda, like Lenin, was traumatized by the death of his elder brother: in 1905 Mikhail Iagoda, a bystander, was hacked to death by Cossacks at Nizhni’s barricades. (In 1916 Iagoda’s other brother, Lev, an army recruit, was shot for insubordination.) Like and Menzhinsky, Iagoda as a youth depended emotionally on his sisters; one gleans the impression that Genrikh was an unloved son, even more so after the deaths of his brothers, and that the only affection he received, or at least reciprocated, came from his five sisters. Certainly, his subsequent eager allegiance with leading Bolsheviks and chekisty shows the ingratiating clinging sycophancy of a boy chronically starved of parental love. Iagoda’s elder sister, Esfir, worked in a shop in St. Petersburg. Another older sister, Roza, was at nineteen an assistant pharmacist in Moscow and an anarchist. Under Roza’s wing Genrikh worked as an apprentice pharmacist for six months—hence his reputed expertise in poisons—and joined anarchist circles. Nizhni’s anarchists were led by a police informer, Chembarisov. The young Iagoda would never cause serious trouble and was benignly watched by the gendarmerie and Okhranka both in Nizhni and in Moscow.

Iagoda in his callow adolescence was recalled as “thin, middling height, hunched shoulders, with long black hair . . . Unsociable, introverted, sullen.” To another he seemed “a wolf cub at bay.” (His adult demeanor, with an unsmiling Velásquez face and a toothbrush mustache, was that of a cornered rat.) Police spies code-named him “Little Owl” or “Lonely.” The police description of 1910, when Genrikh visited his sister in Moscow, conjures up a very un-Bolshevik Iagoda: “Wearing white shirt with long white tie, greyish jacket, black trousers, large grey tie pin . . . long hair.” Iagoda, as a pharmacist, was supposed to procure explosives for bombs to rob a bank in Nizhni, but he was so inert that the police did not bother to arrest him until May 16, 1912. They found nothing incriminating beyond false papers and did not even link Iagoda with the notorious Iakov Sverdlov. Iagoda was sent to Simbirsk for two years under police supervision.

In 1913 the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary and Genrikh was amnestied. He moved to Petersburg, where Nikolai Podvoisky, a newspaper editor who became the first Bolshevik minister for the armed forces, impressed by his connections to the Sverdlovs and by his eagerness to please, found him work in the health insurance office of the Putilov steelworks. Podvoisky was a fruitful contact: he was the brother-in-law of two future Cheka chiefs, Kedrov and Artuzov. Iagoda secured even better connections by marrying in 1914 Ida Averbakh, Iakov Sverdlov’s niece and the daughter of his possible childhood benefactor. Ida was intelligent, but too unprepossessing to reject such a lowly suitor as Iagoda. For Genrikh, however, she was a catch; her ambitious brother Leopold Averbakh would dominate Soviet literary politics.

In 1915 Iagoda was conscripted. He rose to lance corporal, was wounded, and discharged. When revolution broke out, Iagoda joined the Bolsheviks, backdating his membership to 1907. Just before his death in 1919, Iakov Sverdlov wrote to recommending Iagoda for the Cheka rank and file. valued reliability above education or intellect and quickly promoted Iagoda. Sverdlov had also found Iagoda work in the Supreme Military Inspectorate. In disputes between Trotsky and Stalin over military policy, Sverdlov’s military inspectorate took Stalin’s side. Iagoda was soon editing with Stalin a soldier’s edition of Pravda. He was now indissolubly linked to Stalin and to the Cheka.