head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin (Stalin, Joseph) from 1934 to 1936 and a central figure in the purge trials.

Yagoda joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 and became a member of the presidium of the Cheka (Soviet secret police) in 1920. He was a deputy chairman of the Cheka's successor organization, OGPU, from 1924 to 1934 and from 1930 was in charge of the system of forced-labour camps in the Soviet Union. A close, longtime associate of Stalin, Yagoda became in 1934 a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was put in charge of the newly organized Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or NKVD, into which the secret police had been absorbed. There is evidence that Yagoda was instrumental in engineering in 1934 the assassination of Sergey Mironovich Kirov (Kirov, Sergey Mironovich), Leningrad party secretary and a member of the Politburo, whom Stalin perceived as a potential rival. As head of the NKVD, Yagoda prepared the first of the public purge trials (August 1936), in which Zinovyev, L.B. Kamenev, and a number of their associates confessed to a series of astonishing charges and were immediately executed.

One year later Yagoda himself became a victim of the widespread purges that he had helped to carry out on Stalin's orders. He was removed from office in September 1936 and replaced as People's Commissar by N.I. Yezhov, under whose direction the purge trials proceeded. Yagoda was arrested in 1937 and became a defendant at the third public purge trial (March 1938). He was accused of being a member of a “Trotskyite” conspiracy intent on destroying the Soviet Union through sabotage. He was convicted, sentenced to death on March 13, and shot soon afterward.