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Yagoda, Genrikh Grigorevich
(1891-1938)
Soviet official
Together with Lavrenty
BERIA
and Nikolai
YEZHOV
, Yagoda belongs to the troika of the
bloodiest secret police chiefs of the Stalinist era.
As commissar of the People's commissariat for
internal affairs (NKVD), Yagoda prepared and
conducted the early purges that followed the
assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934,
but in 1937 he himself fell victim to the execu-
tioner's bullet. He was born into a Jewish family
and joined the Bolshevik Party in 1907. Exiled
for his revolutionary activities from 1911 to
1913, he then served in the Russian army from
1915, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917
worked in the People's Commissariat for Foreign
Trade, 1919-22, and joined the
CHEKA
in 1920.
He advanced to deputy chairman of the GPU in
1924.
STALIN
made him people's commissar of
internal affairs in 1934, and as such he carried
out the early purges after the assassination of
Kirov. In July 1936, Stalin dismissed him for
alleged slackness and replaced him with Nikolai
Yezhov. Toying with Yagoda while a case against
him was prepared, Stalin appointed him people's
commissar for posts and telegraph after his dis-
missal. In 1937 he was arrested and became one
of the chief defendants at the Trial of the Anti-
Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Troskyites, an ironic
touch given Yagoda's past persecution of these
groups. Rumor has it that Yagoda was personally
executed by his successor, Yezhov, in the cellars
of the Lubianka Prison in Moscow. The party
commission that in 1988 rehabilitated the defen-
dants of the 1938 trial pointedly excluded
Yagoda from its list.
Yakovlev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich
(1923- )
Soviet official
Yakovlev is often considered the father of glas-
nost (openness) and the intellectual mentor of
Mikhail
GORBACHEV
during the latter's years in
power. Yakovlev was born into a peasant family
in Yaroslavl and joined the Red Army in 1941 in
time for the war. Severely wounded in fighting
in 1943, Yakovlev joined the
COMMUNIST PARTY
in 1944 and graduated from the Yaroslavl Peda-
gogical Institute in 1946. After a few years in the
Yaroslavl party apparatus, Yakovlev was called to
Moscow in 1953 to work in the party's Central
Committee apparatus. While studying at the
Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Com-
mittee, Yakovlev spent a year at New York City's
Columbia University in 1959 as one of the first
participants in the Soviet-American cultural
exchanges, an experience that he later acknowl-
edged shaped his future thinking about commu-
nism. From 1965 to 1973, Yakovlev occupied a
top-level position in the Central Committee's
department of propaganda, on his way to a solid
career in the
BREZHNEV
-era Communist party.
However, in 1973 he was shunted aside and
appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada, after
publishing an article that offended conservative
party members by attacking what he saw as ris-
ing Soviet nationalism and chauvinism. During
Mikhail Gorbachev's 1984 tour of Canada in his
capacity as the Politburo's specialist on agricul-
ture, Yakovlev impressed favorably the rising
star of Soviet politics. In 1983, General Secretary
Yuri
ANDROPOV
appointed Yakovlev director of
the prestigious Institute of World Economy and
International Relations (IMEMO) in Moscow. In
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