Genrikh Yagoda
Soviet secret police official (1891–1938)
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Russian: Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да, romanized: Genrikh Grigor'yevich Yagoda, born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda; 7 November 1891 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised arrests, show trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic events of the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the gulag system, during which 12,000–25,000 laborers died.
Like many NKVD officers who oversaw political repression under Stalin's rule, Yagoda himself ultimately became a victim of the regime's purges. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.
Early life
Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family. The son of a jeweller, he trained as a statistician and worked as a pharmacist's assistant. Yagoda claimed that he was an active revolutionary from the age of 14, when he worked as a compositor on an underground printing press in Nizhny Novgorod, and that at the age of 15, he was a member of a fighting squad in the Sormovo district of Nizhny Novgorod during the violent suppression of the 1905 revolution.
“Genrikh Yagoda” enters the record as soviet secret police official (1891–1938). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Genrikh, Yagoda and Soviet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q141869. VIAF identifies the subject as 18033143. The Library of Congress control number is nr95041601. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1938, 1934 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Genrikh Yagoda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.