The Security Forces. Genrikh Yagoda

The Bolsheviks created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to fight counterrevolution and sabotage in order to deal with the army of officials who boycotted the new power and sabotaged orders of the Council of People’s Commissars. But party leaders quickly understood the price of the state security bodies as the most important tool of control over the country. That’s how power enforcers appeared—ones that did not exist in old Russia. Leonid Mlechin’s book, describing the triangle of power: party secretaries, military commanders, and the heads of the special services, consists of three parts. The first two are named after prominent figures of their time—Gенrich Yagoda and Lavrenty Beria—while the third is impersonal: “People in Uniform.” But the representatives of the power structures described in it did not dissolve into history; they are still remembered.

We offer you the part of the book devoted to Genrikh Georgiyevich Yagoda.