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

On March 28, 1937, Frinovsky, whom Ezhov had made his deputy, searched Iagoda’s dacha. Iagoda was picked up the next day at his Moscow apartment. He was taken to the Lubianka and the apartment was ransacked for a week by five officers. Little public action had to be taken. There were no paintings or statues of Iagoda and very few photographs to destroy; he was responsible for only one publication, The White Sea–Baltic Canal, which was pulped; three sites named after him—a railway bridge in the Far East, a training school for frontier guards, and a commune—were renamed. When Trotsky was expelled and Zinoviev arrested, dozens of towns changed names, millions of books were withdrawn, photographs airbrushed, paintings retouched. Iagoda went down with barely a ripple.

Under interrogation, Iagoda admitted his sympathies for Bukharin and Rykov and his distress at Stalin’s policies; he confessed to furnishing friends’ dachas using over a million rubles of NKVD funds. But a month passed and he still would not admit espionage and counterrevolution, nor did the interrogators find jewelry thought to have passed through his hands. When Ezhov complained of Iagoda’s recalcitrance, Stalin suggested that Efim Evdokimov, who had not been an NKVD employee for three years, should take over the interrogation. Evdokimov sat opposite Iagoda—now a pathetic figure, his hands handcuffed behind his back, his trousers falling down—downed a vodka, rolled up his sleeves to show his apelike biceps, asked, “Well, international spy, you’re not confessing?” and boxed his former chief’s ears.

From this point truth blends with fiction in Iagoda’s statements. ⁵⁰ He seems to have seen the pointlessness of holding back and confessed to attempting to overthrow the state with the help of the Kremlin guard and the military, revelations which gave Stalin and Ezhov plenty of material for future use. He said he had poisoned, with the help of Dr. Levin, the NKVD doctor, virtually everyone he knew who had died in the last four years: Menzhinsky, Gorky, Gorky’s son, Kuibyshev. He even confessed to impregnating Ezhov’s office with mercury vapor. The only accusations he balked at—even though the promise of his life was dangled in front of him—were spying and murdering Kirov. As he cleverly declared at his trial, “If I were a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services.”

Some of Iagoda’s statements ring true. He called himself a skeptic, “wearing a mask, but with no program,” who had followed Stalin rather than Trotsky out of calculation not conviction. As Iagoda’s interrogation proceeded, a second show trial of Zinovievites took place, the Red Army’s marshals, generals, and colonels were purged, and the arrests of Bukharin and his supporters provided more material, some true, most false, to force Iagoda into total self-incrimination. To Iagoda’s credit, he incriminated first himself, then others who were already arrested and doomed, and avoided saying evil of those who might yet be at liberty.

The most hurtful evidence against Iagoda came on May 17 in a letter from his own brother-in-law, Leopold Averbakh, to Ezhov:

Iagoda directly propelled us into maximum involvement in the struggle against Gorky. . . . Iagoda several times talked of Voroshilov’s invariably bad view of him, and he did so in a tone of outright hatred. . . . In private conversation with Gorky you could feel that the topic of conversation was beyond Iagoda. . . . Iagoda needed Gorky as a possible weapon in political games. . . . I am writing this statement to you since I am obliged to reveal to the utmost and in every way the utterly loathsome personality of Iagoda and everything I know of his inimical activity . . . so that the party can cauterize this gangrene fully and wholly and cleanse Soviet air of this scum and stench.

This mendacious letter bought Averbakh perhaps a year’s extra life.