Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda headed the NKVD from 1934 to 1936, the years when Stalin's terror machine began consuming the revolution's founding generation. He supervised the arrests and executions of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic moments of the Great Purge, and oversaw construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal using gulag labor that killed between 12,000 and 25,000 people. In 1936 Stalin replaced him with Nikolai Yezhov. A year later Yagoda was arrested, charged with wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, and made a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last maj…