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

For some months Iagoda was left to stew in his cell. In December, the NKVD went for him again, this time to make him admit that he had conspired to poison Max Peshkov, his mistress’s husband, and then Gorky himself. Iagoda’s confession was ambiguous: he had encouraged Kriuchkov to make Max drink and to take him for drives in an open car, to let him sleep out on dew-covered benches, and then let Dr. Levin treat the resulting pneumonia with lethal medicine. Iagoda’s doctors had likewise hastened Menzhinsky’s end, and he had hurried both Gorky and Kuibyshev to their deaths—the former dying from the effects of his return to Moscow from the warm Crimea, the latter by making a trip to central Asia. When the doctors were confronted by the interrogator with Iagoda, they admitted guilt but could not say how they had finished off their patients. They said that Iagoda would have killed them had they disobeyed him.⁵¹

Interrogation was over. Early in 1938 one of Averbakh’s associates, the playwright Vladimir Kirshon, was put in Iagoda’s cell as a stool pigeon. Kirshon reported Iagoda’s conversations to Major Aleksandr Zhurbenko, one of Ezhov’s short-lived star interrogators. Not for a decade had Iagoda spoken so sincerely. Iagoda wanted only to know what had happened to his wife, Ida, to his mistress, Timosha, and to his eight-year-old son, Genrikh. He expected death any day. He denied poisoning Gorky and his son, not just because he was innocent but because of the hurt it would cause Timosha. As he was to die anyway he was inclined to deny everything, were it not that “this would play into the hands of counterrevolution.” He could endure the trial if he were allowed to speak to Ida; he dreamed of dying before the trial; he felt mentally ill. He wept constantly, he fought for his breath.⁵² Iagoda even fumbled for his Judaic roots. An NKVD guard reports him exclaiming, “There is a God. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude, but I have broken God’s commandments ten thousand times and this is my punishment.”

On March 9, 1938, Iagoda took the stand at the last of Stalin’s three great show trials. As Trotsky commented, if Goebbels had admitted that he was the agent of the pope, he would have astonished the world less than Iagoda’s indictment as the agent of Trotsky. Only Bukharin and Iagoda dared to hint to the public that the trial was a sham. Iagoda refused to elaborate on his role in the death of Gorky’s son. As for Kirov’s death, he asserted that he was as a matter of principle against such terrorism. Any version that Vyshinsky proffered, he parried, saying, “It wasn’t like that, but it doesn’t matter.” He claimed to have seen Dr. Kazakov, allegedly his agent in killing Menzhinsky, for the first time in court. Iagoda called Dr. Levin’s and Kriuchkov’s incriminating evidence “all lies.” Vyshinsky did not press Iagoda, a man who knew how little Stalin’s promises meant and who had nothing to lose. “You can put pressure on me, but don’t go too far. I shall say everything I want to. But don’t go too far.”

At this point there was an interval, after which Iagoda looked as if he had been beaten. “He read his next statement from a piece of paper, as if he was reading it for the first time,” an eyewitness remarked. Iagoda admitted everything except killing Max Peshkov and spying for half a dozen foreign states. His last word was a plea to be allowed to work as a laborer on one of his canals. On March 13, 1938, he was sentenced to death and shot two days later. In July Iagoda’s wife was sentenced to eight years in the camps, and condemned to death a year later. His sister Lili was first exiled to Astrakhan and jailed, then shot. The sister closest to Iagoda, Rozalia, got eight years, then another two, and died in the camps in 1948. One sister, Taisa, survived; in 1966 she asked in vain for Iagoda’s sentence to be quashed.

Iagoda’s father had written to Stalin: