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Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin 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.

The first trial opened in August 1936, while Genrikh G. Yagoda was head of the secret police. The main defendants were Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Ivan Smirnov, all of whom had been prominent Bolsheviks at the time of the October Revolution (1917) and during the early years of the Soviet regime.

Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Генрих Григорьевич Ягода;7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda (Енох Гершевич Иегуда), was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936.

Lódź in Russian Poland, 1891; d. Moscow, 15 Mar. 1938) Chairman of the NKVD 1934–6 Yagoda was the son of a Jewish carpenter. After secondary education he became a statistician. He worked for the father of Sverdlov and married into the Sverdlov family.

Early NKVD leaders, Genrikh Yagoda, then (1924) 1st deputy head of SOU OGPU Vyacheslav Menzhinsky then head of SOU OGPU and deputy head OGPU, and Felix Dzerzhinsky chief of OGPU, 1924 After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsarist police and set up the People's Militias.