Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda 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 in 1936
Yagoda on a police information card from 1912
Yagoda, Menzhinsky, Dzerzhinsky, 1920
Yagoda and his wife Ida Averbakh, deputy prosecutor of Moscow, 30 September 1922
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass
Genrikh Yagoda
…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 Gulag newspaper, Perekovka ("Reforging"), front page announcing the replacement of Genrikh Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov
Yezhov's wife Yevgenia with their adopted daughter Natalia