Stalin and His Hangmen (48 page)

For a little while Iagoda kept his rank of general commissar of state security and Kaganovich was worried that the NKVD might remain loyal to him. Kaganovich told Stalin on 14 October, on the eve of the latter’s return to Moscow:

Ezhov’s affairs are going well. He has got down to the rooting out of counter-revolutionary 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 quietened 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 11 July 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 aeroplanes. In the NKVD, Ezhov was arresting Iagoda’s subordinates, both those he had trusted and those he had quarrelled 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 2 March 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 quarrelling 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.
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The only words in Iagoda’s defence came from Litvinov, commissar for foreign affairs, who praised, albeit faintly, NKVD counter-intelligence, 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.

On 28 March 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 roubles of NKVD funds. But a month passed and he still would not admit espionage and counter-revolution, nor did the interrogators find jewellery 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 ape-like 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.
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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 vapour. The only accusations he baulked 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 sceptic, ‘wearing a mask, but with no programme’, 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 17 May 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.

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.
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Interrogation was over. Early in 1938 Averbakh’s associate, 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 counter-revolution’. He could endure the trial if he were allowed to speak to Ida; he dreamt of dying before the trial; he felt mentally ill. He wept constantly, he fought for his breath.
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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 9 March 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 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 labourer on one of his canals. On 13 March 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:

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, 26 June, 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…
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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 afterwards. 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

Between the murder of Kirov and the dismissal of Iagoda, Stalin operated with maniacal energy and cold, calculated purpose. Everything he did gave the Soviet state what later observers believed was its magical source of strength: its monolithic power. Stalin eliminated, politically and then physically, all politicians who had shown a capacity to act or even think independently. He set in stone a pyramidal power structure: himself, his Politbiuro, the NKVD, the party’s bureaucracy. He asserted total control over every government commissariat, from foreign policy to culture and light engineering. He structured the population so that there was no social basis for any revolt or dissent: the peasantry were crushed, the intelligentsia suborned or terrified, the workers tied to their workplaces. Only the army remained self-governing, and not for long. Stalin pushed women away from power; a few token women did his bidding on the Central Committee but the valkyries of the revolution were all disarmed. He made divorce difficult, abortion nearly impossible and homosexuality illegal. There was no prospect of a new generation shattering the monolith; children and adolescents were organized into the Communist Youth Movement, which kept a tight grip on their activities and ideology from puberty to adulthood. The class system was allegedly abolished although actually a caste system was emerging. The party became self-perpetuating. There were no more spectacular
mésalliances
like the marriage of Kollontai and Dybenko; party, NKVD and intelligentsia interbred: Gorky’s grand-daughter married Beria’s son and Stalin’s grandson Fadeev’s daughter.