Those who had sat in the Sverdlov Hall through the jaw-dropping plenum did not yet know, but “testimony” being compiled in NKVD cellars painted a scenario of a Red Army/NKVD plot to seize power in the Soviet Union, Franco style.89 The NKVD, in a March 1937 draft document in connection with the plenum, asserted that foreign intelligence services had established a gigantic number of spy centers in the USSR, while conceding, “We do not know where they are or who belongs to the counterrevolutionary organizations created by foreign intelligence agencies, and as a result we cannot liquidate them at the necessary moment.”90 They could have been inside the NKVD itself.
Stalin’s weapon against his own NKVD leadership was, as in all other institutions, the party. Following the despot’s call to ramp up enemy hunting at the plenum, Yezhov, as per usual practice, convened a meeting of the NKVD “party active” at Lubyanka (March 19–21) to discuss the lessons. All top NKVD operatives were party members. Yezhov set the tone by lacerating Yagoda, then invited those present to speak up, a devastatingly simple way to elicit denunciations.91 Gleeful revenge against Yagoda and others poured forth, but it was mixed with terrified self-preservation: how could the operatives denounce Yagoda, under whom they had all worked, without somehow implicating themselves? On March 29, Mikhail Frinovsky—who had a lot to prove, having been a top operative under Yagoda—led a team that arrested his former boss, and beat Yagoda demonstratively in the process.92
Yagoda’s arrest was stunning.93, 94 He knew that “Stalin treated [him] coolly and met with him just for official business” (as one of Stalin’s top bodyguards would later put it).95, 96 Still, Yagoda could be forgiven if he imagined himself to be indispensable, given his services to Stalin: millions of kulaks deported, countless priority construction objects completed, comprehensive surveillance imposed on the army, the party-state, cultural elites. Yagoda held the rank of “general commissar of state security” (equivalent to marshal), which he had retained even after being shunted over to the communications commissariat. Some NKVD operatives had taken to referring to the party apparatchik as Yezhov’s “temporary posting” to the NKVD, as Kaganovich had informed Stalin.97 But Yezhov finally had been named to that rank, which Yagoda lost. After seventeen years at the very top of the secret police, he was reduced to waiting for the despot to return him to favor.
Yagoda’s passivity was not a given. He had controlled assassination squads, a poison laboratory, a plethora of safe houses (at home and abroad), even an ability to eavesdrop on Stalin. Because of the length of his service in the organs (from 1919), he had a network whose mutual loyalties predated Stalin’s full power.98 But Yagoda turned out to be a mere minion, while Stalin studied, fostered, and used the NKVD’s natural rivalries and animosities to control him even before appointing Yezhov to supervise NKVD business on behalf of the unchallengeable party. Now Stalin used these internal antagonisms, as well as Yezhov, to annihilate Yagoda. Once the invitation came down from on high, score settling proved irresistible and self-preservation instincts kicked in.99 In denunciations, Yagoda’s subordinates revealed that they viewed him not as a Dzierżyński-like sword and shield of the revolution but as unprincipled, a cruel boss, a shady wheeler and dealer (
When Frinovsky’s squad raked over Yagoda’s Kremlin apartment (Miliutinsky Lane, 9) and his sumptuous dacha (Ozerki), they found 1,229 bottles of wine (the majority of foreign origin and dating to as early as 1897), 11,075 cigarettes of foreign make (Turkish and Egyptian), along with 8 boxes of foreign tobacco, 3,904 pornographic photos and 11 pornographic films, 21 men’s overcoats, mostly foreign made, plus 4 fur coats and 4 leather overcoats, 11 foreign-made leather jackets, 22 men’s suits, 31 pairs of imported women’s shoes, and 22,997 rubles. The list went on (and on): 399 foreign music records, 101 imported children’s games, 37 pairs of imported gloves, 17 large carpets, 7 medium-size carpets, 5 animal skin carpets (bear, leopard, wolf), a collection of 165 pipes (including some made of elephant tusks), 95 bottles of imported perfume, 542 examples of Trotskyite and fascist literature.101 Only the infamous foreign jewelry Yagoda and his minion Alexander Lurye used to entrap foreigners and enrich themselves had failed to turn up. Word of the eye-popping inventory advanced through the rumor mill, further discrediting Yagoda and his closest associates.102