Yagoda was charged with embezzlement and leading a conspiracy on behalf of Nazi Germany to assassinate Stalin. Had Yagoda been a long-standing foreign agent, he let pass countless opportunities to have Stalin and entourage killed (such as the night of the Kirov assassination, when, as Yagoda knew, Stalin and his clique were all together on a train to Leningrad).
No one in Stalin’s inner circle would defend Yagoda, who had relentlessly intruded into their commissariats and persecuted their personnel. “I repeat: I knew Voroshilov hated me,” Yagoda would soon be quoted as testifying, when asked why he supposedly felt compelled to eavesdrop on Stalin’s telephone conversations. “Molotov and Kaganovich held me in the same hostile regard.”103 The cronies were not so naïve as to imagine Yagoda had launched these proctology exams on their institutions of his own accord, but they could imagine that he had lobbied Stalin for his own initiatives to make their lives miserable. Kaganovich compared Yagoda with Joseph Fouché, the French Revolution’s unscrupulous secret policeman who managed to survive four regimes (Jacobins, Directory, Napoleon, the Restoration) and became associated with counterrevolution.104 Yagoda lacked a prerevolutionary Bolshevik underground past. “My whole life I went about with a mask,” Yagoda was recorded as confessing, in interrogation protocols, “making myself out to be a staunch Bolshevik. In fact, in its real understanding, I was never a Bolshevik.” Stalin underlined this passage, among others.105 (An interrogation transcript of Avel Yenukidze arrived the same day as Yagoda’s.) It is almost as if the endless hours of interrogations, and the lengthy written and signed protocols, were for
Other stunning arrests followed: the head of the NKVD special department for security in the military, Mark Gai, and the head of Stalin’s bodyguards, Pauker.106 They and many more were “unmasked” as fascist spies plotting to assassinate the leadership. Pauker could have withdrawn the Kremlin guard, leaving Stalin exposed. But he did not have to go to that trouble: Pauker shaved Stalin and could have slit his throat. Back when Yagoda had been sacked from the NKVD, Pauker had been the one to block his access to Stalin’s dacha in Sochi, and now, just a few months later, he was supposed to have been been in a conspiracy with Yagoda against Stalin
The fabrications and the beating of people to unconsciousness to extract pre-scripted testimony of assassination “plots” did, for some Chekists, violate professional pride. But the problem for them was not that, or not that alone; rather, they had all worked with Yagoda. Why had they not spoken earlier? Were they secretly in league with him? Operatives who initially survived Yagoda’s sacking now became still more “vigilant”: that is, they attempted to ward off their own arrests, magnifying the slaughterhouse. Back in February 1937, Yakov Agranov—the first deputy NKVD chief, who had taken over state security (GB) from the arrested Molchanov—had asked regional NKVD branches for lists of operatives and other staff who had been Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and rightists.108 But in spring 1937, Agranov would be demoted to Saratov province. There, he proceeded to extract “confessions” left and right, including from his immediate local predecessor, Roman Pilar von Pilhau, who confessed to trying to organize Yezhov’s assassination, the ultimate extracted accusation for someone like Agranov, seeking to ingratiate himself with the new boss. But with so many “Yagodaites” giving “testimony” under torture, denunciations against Agranov flowed like lava, and soon he, too, would be arrested.109
Through it all, the NKVD never broke down, let alone rebelled. The ease with which Yagoda was destroyed proved that there was no threat whatsoever to Stalin’s rule. The secret police, even under assault, remained an utterly reliable instrument of his will, a testament to both the limits of the feared yet despised Yagoda’s authority and the strength of Stalin’s as supreme leader.
DEFT MANEUVERS