Yakov Yakovlev
Yakov Arkadyevich Yakovlev (real name: Epstein; Russian: Я́ков Арка́дьевич Я́ковлев, 9 June 1896, Grodno – 29 July 1938) was a Soviet politician and statesman who played a central role in the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1920s.
Early career
Yakov Yakovlev was born in
In 1921, Yakovlev was transferred to Moscow, to work for the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Education, and the
Commissar for Agriculture
Until 1929, agriculture was the responsibility of the member states that made up the
In December 1929, Yakovlev produced a report which suggested that "at least a third" of agricultural land in the USSR should be sown collectively in spring 1930. This report was rejected by Stalin, who thought it too cautious.[5] Some of his other proposals, such as allowing peasants to retain ownership of small tools and small livestock, were also overruled by Stalin, whose orders Yakovlev carried out faithfully. The resulting famine cost possibly millions of lives in the Ukrainian Holodomor, and millions more across the rest of the USSR.
Yakovlev was one of the first officials to sponsor the career of the now-discredited, quack biologist
In July 1932, Stalin complained that Yakovlev's department had "failed" and was "completely inept"[7] – principally because it had encouraged indiscriminate planting instead of crop rotation. At the end of a criminal trial of economic managers in August 1933, the prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky said that the verdict raised "general questions" about Yakovlev's department. Yakovlev was present at the next Politburo meeting, which forced an apology from Vyshinsky, though Stalin, who was absent from that meeting, subsequently backed Vyshinsky. The following month, Stalin complained that "Yakovlev is no boss but an empty-head and puffed-up windbag."[8]
In April 1934, he was transferred to party headquarters as head of the agricultural department. At the start of the Great Purge, he launched a tirade in the Soviet press against Lysenko's opponents in agricultural science, singling out Vavilov as their leader, and denouncing genetics as a form of religion whose practitioners were "reactionaries and saboteurs."[9]
On 27 July 1937, he was appointed acting First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, to oversee the removal of the incumbent First Secretary, Vasily Sharangovich and the arrests of suspected 'national fascists', but was recalled on 8 August.[10]
Arrest and Death
Nikita Khrushchev described a dinner in Stalin's apartment, at which he and Yakovlev were the only guests:
Yakovlev was in a very agitated state. You could see he was undergoing some sort of inner turmoil. He feared that he was about to be arrested. He wasn't mistaken in his forebodings. Shortly after Stalin's friendly chat with him over dinner, Yakovlev was arrested and eliminated. I'm telling this story to show how even someone as close to Stalin as Yakovlev – who had been one of Stalin's most trusted supporters during the struggle against the opposition – could suddenly find his life hanging by a thread.[11]
Yakovlev arrested on 12 October 1937. His wife Sofia Sokolovskaya – who was multilingual and had travelled extensively – was arrested on the same day. It appears that she was interrogated first. On 15 October, he was told that she had denounced him as having been a police informer before the 1917 Revolution. In November Stalin told Georgi Dimitrov that "Yakovlev's wife was a French spy",[12] which would imply it was her connections abroad that brought both of them under suspicion.
He denied having been a police informer, but "confessed" to having been a secret supporter of Trotsky since 1922, and a German spy since 1935,[13] and to have been the head of a vast counter-revolutionary organisation to which he had personally recruited more than 100 individuals, whom he named.[14]
When he was expelled from the Central Committee, on 12 December 1937, it was on the grounds that he was a police spy and a German spy,.
Yakovlev was executed on July 29, 1938.
He was posthumously rehabilitated on 5 January 1957.[1]
References
- ^ a b "Яков Аркадьевич Яковлев". На Главную>Биографический Указатель>Указателья. Khronos. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
- ISBN 978-3-83-821107-7.
- ^ Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904 – 1932, University of East Anglia
- ^ Khevliuk, Oleg V., ed. (1995). Stalinskoe Politbiuro v 30-e gody: Sbornik dokumentov. Moscow: Airo XX. p. 106.
- ISBN 0-09-956960-4.
- ISBN 081-352087-8.
- ISBN 0-300-09367-5.)
{{cite book}}
:|first1=
has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence. pp. 190–91, 218.
- ISBN 978-1-906217-91-4.
- ^ "Яковлев (Эпштейн) Яков Аркадьевич 1896-1938 Биогафический Указатель". Khronos. Retrieved 21 July 2023.
- ^ Khrushchev, Nikita (1971). Khrushchev Remembers. Sphere. pp. 82–83 (Khrushchev remembered this dinner as having taken place in February 1939, which is clearly wrong. The plausible date is 1937.
- ISBN 0-300-09794-8.
- ^ "Протокол допроса Я.А. Яковлева (Interrogation report of Ya. A. Yakovlev) 15.10.1937". ЛУБЯНКА: Сталин и Главное управление госбезопасности НКВД. (LUBYANKA: Stalin and the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD.). Alexander Yakovlev Fund. Retrieved 24 December 2020.
- ^ "О посмертной реабилитации Яковлева (Эпшейна) Я.А. (Re the posthumous rehabilitation of Yakovlev (Epstein) Ya. A.)" (PDF). Исторические Материалы. Retrieved 25 February 2023.
- ISBN 0-300-07772-6.
- ^ Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet 'Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites'. Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR. 1938. p. 71.
- ^ Conquest, Robert (1971). The Great Terror. Harmondsworth.: Penguin. p. 359.
External links
- Yakov Yakovlev at Handbook on history of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union 1898–1991