The Russian Jerusalem (15 page)

Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. He rose through the ranks of the Cheka to become Deputy to Feliks Dzershinsky and in 1934 Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda oversaw the interrogation process leading to the first Moscow Show Trial and the subsequent execution of former
Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936. However, on 16 September 1936, Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov and in March 1937 was arrested and found guilty of treason. After another show trial in March 1938, he was executed by shooting.

A famous Odessa gangster, who was one of the models for Isaac Babel's character Benya Krik.

Yeltsin was declared the first President of the Russian Federation in 1991 after his courage helped to defeat the coup against Gorbachev. By the time he left office, however, Yeltsin was deeply unpopular. His reforms devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era State subsidies. Hyper-inflation wiped out personal savings. In 2000, he announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin died in 2007.

Yevtushenko is the best-known poet of the generation which grew up after Stalin's death. He was born in Irkutsk, Siberia. He came to Moscow to study at the Gorky Institute and published poetry which rapidly became hugely popular. He gave readings to audiences whose numbers could fill football stadiums and became a figure on the international stage with his poem ‘Babiy Yar' (1961) which denounced both Nazi and Russian
anti-Semitism
. He was often outspoken, but both Khrushchev and Brezhnev saw he was a useful ambassador for Socialism and he was allowed to travel abroad widely. He sometimes took risks for his friends: the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn took shelter for a time at his flat. When the Soviet regime collapsed, and sales of all books diminished, he supplemented his income by teaching at the American University of Oklahoma.

Yezhov replaced Yagoda as Head of the Secret Police from 1936 to 1938 during Stalin's greatest purges. He was only five foot tall, had a club foot and a reputation for taking pleasure in cruelty.

Andrei Zhdanov was born in Mariupol, Ukraine. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and became a close associate of Joseph Stalin. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Stalin appointed Zhdanov as Governor of Leningrad. In this post he played an important role in the great purges that took place in the Communist Party between 1934 and 1941. After the war, he led the purge of non-conformist artists and intellectuals. Following his carefully worded decree in 1946, the Executive Committee expelled Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko from the Union of Soviet Writers. He died in 1948.

 

 

First published in 2008
by Carcanet Press Ltd,
Alliance House,
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Manchester M2 7AQ

This ebook edition first published in 2011

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Epub ISBN 978–1–84777–784–3
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