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

By 1929, with Menzhinsky’s connivance, Iagoda had all sectors of OGPU staffed with his own protégés: Frinovsky in the special department, which hunted down deviant party and government members; Iakov Agranov in the secret department, created in 1923 to control intellectuals; and Karl Pauker in the operative department, which guarded Stalin. As Menzhinsky lay dying, OGPU feared that either Kaganovich or Mikoyan, both Stalin’s creatures, would be put in charge of them. Iagoda, Frinovsky, Agranov, and Pauker did their utmost to block outsiders from chairing OGPU.

Disaster struck Iagoda when Bukharin sought out Kamenev to propose an anti-Stalin coalition. Bukharin’s total words were: “Iagoda and Trilisser are with us.” OGPU knew Stalin had his own informants so they had to get in first with an explanation. On February 6, 1929, Menzhinsky, Iagoda, and Trilisser reported to Stalin Kamenev’s “nonsensical slander either of Comrade Bukharin or of us, and whether or not Comrade Bukharin said anything of the sort, we deem it essential to refute this slander categorically in front of the party.” Henceforth, Iagoda avoided Bukharin, but Stalin’s trust, once lost, was irretrievable.

From 1929, Iagoda felt more and more vulnerable. In response, he aimed to be indispensable. He and Agranov infiltrated the intelligentsia so thoroughly that by 1932 the party was able to take complete control of all the creative arts. Iagoda and Frinovsky devised ambitious enterprises for the GULAG that made it vital to Stalin’s industrialization. From this frantic activity, Iagoda sought Baudelairean relief in luxe, calme et volupté, falling helplessly in love with Gorky’s daughter-in-law.

The inventory of Iagoda’s possessions, compiled by two lieutenants, two captains, and a brigadier of the NKVD who arrested him, says much about Iagoda and Ida’s lifestyle:

Soviet money 22,997 rubles 59 kopecks, include savings book for 6,180.59

Various wines, 1,229 bottles, most foreign and of 1897, 1900 and 1902 vintages

A collection of pornographic photographs—3,904 items

Pornographic films—11

Cigarettes, various foreign, Egyptian and Turkish—11,075

Foreign tobacco—9 boxes

Men’s coats, most foreign—21

Fur coats and squirrel fur jackets—9

Ladies’ coats, various foreign—9

Foreign shirts, Jäger—23

Foreign underpants, Jäger—26

[ . . . ]

Gramophones, foreign—2

Radiogram, foreign—3

Gramophone records, foreign—399

[ . . . ]

Silk ladies’ shifts, mostly foreign—68

Knitted cardigans, mostly foreign—31

Ladies’ panties, silk, foreign—70

Cosmetic boxes in leather suitcases—6

Foreign children’s toys—101 sets

[ . . . ]

Fishing equipment, foreign—73 items

Field binoculars—7

[ . . . ]

Various revolvers—19

Sporting guns and small-arm rifles—12

Infantry rifles—2

[ . . . ]

Automobile—1

[ . . . ]

Pipes and cigarette holders (ivory, amber, etc.), most pornographic—165

[ . . . ]

A rubber artificial phallus

[ . . . ]

Antique crockery—1,008 items

[ . . . ]

Various foreign objects (ovens, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, lamps)—71

[ . . . ]

Foreign sanitary and hygienic objects (medicines, contraceptive sheaths)—115

Pianos—3

[ . . . ]

Counterrevolutionary Trotskyist, fascist literature—542

Foreign suitcases and trunks—24¹²

and Menzhinsky had fatal flaws and arrogance, but their probity was never doubted, and they received solemn state funerals. Compared to them Iagoda was a petty figure; his arrogance and his cruelty reflected an inner insecurity, which was to be his undoing. His ashes would be thrown in a nameless pit, not placed in a mausoleum.

The Trophy Writer

One night a werewolf slipped away

From wife and child and went to see

A village teacher in his grave

And asked him, “Please, will you decline me?”

The pedagogue climbed up and out

Onto his coffin of brass and lead

And spoke to the werewolf, who, devout,

Crossed his paws in front of the dead. . . .

Christian Morgenstern

IN 1929 STALIN put the littérateur Menzhinsky in charge of crushing the peasantry, and chose the provincial ignoramus Genrikh Iagoda to bring the literati to heel. The choices follow Stalinist logic: the hangman should have nothing in common with, and no sympathy for, the condemned, although, for all his ignorance, Iagoda had two links to the literary world. His brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh was a critic, and Iagoda himself was virtually a kinsman of Russia’s most prestigious left-wing writer, Maxim Gorky. In 1928 Iagoda’s career was boosted when Stalin used him to bring Maxim Gorky back to the USSR. For six years, ostensibly for his health, Gorky had lived on the island of Capri.¹³