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

Ezhov’s affairs are going well. He has gotten down to the rooting out of counterrevolutionary bandits firmly and energetically, he conducts interrogations remarkably well and with political competence. But it seems that some of the apparatus, even though it has now quieted down, will not be loyal to him. Take for example a question which has a lot of meaning for them, that of rank. There is talk that Iagoda still remains General Commissar, while Ezhov, they say, will not be given that rank and so on. . . . Don’t you think, Comrade Stalin, that it is essential to pose this question?

Iagoda fell to his doom with excruciating slowness. In 1934 he saw Stalin almost weekly when the latter was in the Kremlin; these meetings often lasted two hours. In 1935 and the first half of 1936 Stalin saw him on average once a fortnight, usually for no more than one hour. In 1934 his rival Ezhov would see Stalin as frequently, but for shorter visits. In the course of 1935 and 1936, Ezhov met Stalin more and more often and they were frequently together for three hours at a time. On July 11, 1936, Iagoda had his last meeting in Stalin’s office.

Iagoda did not take his new commissariat seriously: he spent October and November 1936 on sick leave. When he did turn up, he came late and sat idly at his desk, rolling crumbs of bread into balls or making paper airplanes. In the NKVD, Ezhov was arresting Iagoda’s subordinates, both those he had trusted and those he had quarreled with. Of Iagoda’s close associates only Iakov Agranov was still in post in the new year.

In January 1937 Iagoda lost his general secretary’s rank and on the evening of March 2 was summoned to a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the party to admit responsibility for the failings of the NKVD: he should have unearthed the conspiracies in 1931 and thus saved Kirov’s life; he had ignored Stalin’s directions; his departments had lacked agents. Iagoda was bawled out by Ezhov and mocked by a menacing newcomer, Lavrenti Beria, who had the hall in uproar when he called Iagoda’s NKVD a “company for producing worsted wool.” In desperation, Iagoda blamed his subordinates—Molchanov, for example, was a traitor—and the White Sea canal, which had distracted him from police work. More of Stalin’s jackals made frenzied attacks. Stalin joined in, as did his brother-in-law, Stanislav Redens.

Iagoda had to endure worse harassment the following morning, when he could only get in a few phrases of disavowal. He and Agranov blamed each other. Zakovsky, a Latvian Jew who had taken over the Leningrad NKVD after Kirov’s murder and who was almost the only one of Menzhinsky’s appointees brutal enough to be acceptable to Ezhov, fell upon Iagoda, who was reproached for quarreling with Efim Evdokimov, the GPU chief of the north Caucasus. Finally Evdokimov assessed Iagoda’s performance:

A rotten, non-party speech . . . Iagoda, we know you’re no lamb. . . . Thank God, I know Iagoda well. It’s he who cultivated a very odd choice of people; I ask, now you Iagoda were once my boss, what help did I get from you? . . . Stop blustering, you never gave me help in my work. . . . Iagoda, you were in bed with Rykov and his influence on you shows. . . . Iagoda must be made to answer. And we must think hard about whether he should remain in the Central Committee.⁴⁹

The only words in Iagoda’s defense came from Litvinov, commissar for foreign affairs, who praised, albeit faintly, NKVD counterintelligence, and from Vyshinsky, who acknowledged Iagoda’s “objective material” for trying foreign wreckers. Ezhov finished off, claiming that if he and Stalin hadn’t threatened to “smash Iagoda’s face in,” Kirov’s murderers would not have been caught. The session ended by condemning NKVD slackness. It was the worst day in Iagoda’s life but even worse was to come.