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

Like Stalin, Iagoda traveled all over Russia, inspecting the military from the safety of the rear. Iagoda also had a post in the Commissariat for Foreign Trade, where he befriended a con man, Aleksandr Lurié. Lurié and Iagoda both had sticky fingers and Lurié interested Iagoda in everything foreign, from fine wines and dildos to literature and spies. Iagoda rescued Lurié from prisons in Russia and Germany, and Lurié helped Iagoda profit from lucrative concessions, notably the diamond trade. The Cheka and Foreign Trade Commissariat were linked since one confiscated the valuables which the other sold abroad for hard currency. What marked out Iagoda from and Menzhinsky was that he was corrupt and acquisitive. This did not disqualify him in Stalin’s eyes. Quite the contrary: a Iagoda vulnerable to blackmail was more malleable. Without intellectual distinction or convictions, Iagoda fitted the mold of Stalin’s acolytes. He intuited the wishes of his masters, he questioned nothing, and he worked tirelessly day and night.

Iagoda also came to Lenin’s attention as he knew a lot about medicine and was expert at finding sanatoria where Bolshevik leaders could get their overtaxed hearts and minds treated. Iagoda’s links with doctors, some of whom he intimidated into committing murder, would make him indispensable to Stalin.

As the civil war ended, Iagoda rose to the top of the Cheka. On June 6, 1921, wrote to Unszlicht: “I suggest that Comrade Iagoda should be appointed deputy to Comrade Menzhinsky, who because of his health needs to have a limit on his working hours in the Cheka.” Soon Iagoda was on warm terms with both and Menzhinsky, whom he treated with perhaps genuine affection: “Dear Viacheslav Rudolfovich, I am sending a cab driver with a fur coat [confiscated from a detainee]. I think you may need it. On the whole, it’s quiet in the republic. . . . I’m not writing to you, and I shan’t do so, about cases and new appointments, I’m told it has a bad effect on the health. . . . G. Iagoda.” ⁸

When Stalin became general secretary, Iagoda grasped that the Georgian would succeed Lenin. He began reporting to Stalin directly, bypassing the GPU’s channels and playing deftly on Stalin’s suspicions.⁹ Iagoda also curried favor with Stalin’s cronies such as Voroshilov.

When the Cheka faced peacetime contraction, its salaries paid late, its uniforms and rations withheld, Iagoda lobbied for money. He had an accountant certify that the GPU’s financial position was “catastrophic” and scared the government with the prospect of “mass desertion” from its ranks, “incidents of demoralization, bribe-taking and other sins.” Such energy made Iagoda liked by both and the lower ranks. He was good at fund-raising; he arrested persons who had wealthy relatives in neighboring states such as Latvia, where Russian exiles had little legal protection, and extorted ransoms.¹⁰ Stalin was also impressed by Iagoda’s manipulation of displaced persons: White Cossack refugees in Bulgaria and Turkey fell for Iagoda’s reassurances of amnesty if they went back to their ravaged farms. Helped by the Bulgarian secret police, Iagoda filtered out anticommunists and suspected spies from the returning Cossacks before resettling them and persuaded the League of Nations to bear the costs. OGPU obtained experience that would be used more ruthlessly when many more Cossacks were repatriated after the Second World War.

Iagoda did, however, blunder. He let the head of the Tsarist police, Alexei Lopukhin, leave for France; Lopukhin understandably failed to return. In the 1920s and 1930s a number of defections infuriated Stalin, even if the defectors were of no importance. Worse, Iagoda took visible steps to insure himself lest Stalin lose power. Iagoda naturally gravitated to the right opposition of the party, mainly because Bukharin, Rykov, and others on the right were better company. Unlike the puritanical left, they patronized writers, musicians, and artists; they spoke about Europe (which Iagoda knew only from their stories), they drank good wine and mixed with attractive women. Iagoda loved courtship from the literati, who asked him how to behave if they fell into his clutches. He told Babel, “Deny everything, whatever charges we may bring. Say ‘No,’ only ‘No,’ deny everything, and we are powerless.” But Iagoda feared retribution for his proclivities. Ivan Gronsky, editor of Izvestiia, noticed, “Iagoda was terribly afraid of the Central Committee.”¹¹