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

Many happy years of our life during the revolution have now had a pall cast over them by the very serious crime committed against the party and the country by the only son we still have living—G. G. Iagoda. . . . Instead of justifying the trust placed in him, he became an enemy of the people, for which he must bear the punishment he merits. . . . I am now 78. I am half blind and incapable of working. I have tried to bring up my children in the spirit of devotion to the party and revolution. What words can convey all the weight of the blow that has struck me and my 73-year-old wife, thanks to the crime our last son has committed? . . . We consider it essential to tell you that in his personal life for the last ten years he has been very far from his parents and we cannot have any sympathy for him, nor can we be held responsible, all the less since we have had nothing to do with his deeds. We old people ask you to see that we can be assured of a chance to live out our life, now so short, in our happy Soviet country, for we find ourselves in difficult moral and material circumstances, with no means of existence (we receive no pension). We ask you to protect us, sick old people, from various oppressions by the house administration and the district council, who have begun to take over our apartment and are clearly preparing other measures against us. And this evening, June 26, when we have just got down to writing this letter, we have been ordered to leave Moscow within five days together with several of our daughters. This repressive measure against us seems unmerited and we call upon your sense of justice, knowing your profound wisdom and humanity....⁵³

Deported 800 miles south to Astrakhan, Iagoda’s parents were then arrested. His father died within a week of arriving in the camps, his mother shortly afterward. Timosha Peshkova was left untouched, and lived until 1988. Of Iagoda’s kin, only little Genrikh survived. Two women in the orphanage where he was placed took pity on him and gave him a new surname, under which the Iagoda family line still lives on.

Monolithic Power