Yakov Saulovich Agranov

The case that made Agranov's name known nationwide was the so-called 'Petrograd Combat Organization of V.N. Tagantsev' affair of 1921, a supposed monarchist conspiracy largely fabricated by the Soviet secret police. More than 800 people, mostly from Petrograd's scientific and artistic circles, were arrested on false terrorism charges; 98 were executed and many were sent to labour camps. After the initial investigators failed, Agranov was appointed to lead the case, arrested more people, and gave Tagantsev an ultimatum: confess within three hours or he and all other hostages would be executed, with no one harmed if he cooperated. The names Tagantsev supplied were arrested on 31 July and in the first days of August. The case's most famous victim, the poet Nikolay Gumilev, was arrested on 3 August and shot with 60 others in the Kovalevsky Forest on 24 August. The 45-day solitary confinement of Tagantsev rests on a 1936 emigre memoir (Roman Gul) and is attributed as such rather than treated as neutral fact. In 1992 all those convicted were rehabilitated and the case declared fabricated, though in the 1990s documents supporting the organization's existence entered scholarly circulation.

Agranov was the officer who handled the creative intelligentsia in the Cheka and its successor agencies. He was on friendly terms with many famous writers, poets and artists, and was closely acquainted with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili Brik, Leopold Averbakh and Boris Pilnyak. Watching and socializing were not a contradiction for him but two sides of the job. His name is also bound up with the suspicions surrounding Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930. The poet shot himself with a pistol Agranov had given him, and Agranov later had an affair with Brik. Agranov conducted his own investigation into the poet's death; in 1935 the Kremlin requested the suicide file together with 'the materials collected by Ya. S. Agranov, who carried out his own investigation of the poet's death'. Assessments of the same man diverge sharply. In an emigre memoir Roman Gul called him the 'bloodiest investigator', while Khrushchev's memoir remembered him as 'a remarkable man, a firm chekist', 'an honest, calm, intelligent man', adding that in interrogations he 'did not even raise his voice, let alone apply torture'.

When Kirov was murdered at the Smolny on 1 December 1934, Stalin left that evening by special train and arrived in Leningrad at 10:30 on 2 December with Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Yezhov and Yagoda. Agranov was sent with a group of NKVD officers to replace the discredited Leningrad chekists Medved and Zaporozhets. He directed the Kirov murder investigation and was appointed temporary head of the Leningrad oblast NKVD; with Yagoda and Yezhov he was one of the organizers of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev and prepared materials for the main political trials of the 1930s. The English-language account, however, holds that when Stalin ordered him to fabricate the responsibility of Kamenev, Zinoviev and other opposition leaders, he seems to have resisted, whereupon Stalin entrusted the job to Nikolai Yezhov. Khlevnyuk assesses that Agranov actually entered into a conspiracy against Yagoda together with Yezhov. The two accounts conflict and are recorded side by side rather than resolved. In February 1937 he circulated among regional NKVD heads a demand for the names of Trotskyists and other oppositionists; he was demoted on 15 April, and on 17 May became head of the Saratov oblast NKVD, joining the special troika created by NKVD order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 and taking an active part in the repressions. He was arrested on 20 July 1937 while performing his duties and accused of belonging to a 'counter-revolutionary conspiratorial organization in the organs of the NKVD'. His name appeared on Stalin's execution list of 1 November 1937 but Stalin crossed it out, prolonging his life by nine months; it was re-listed on 26 July 1938 and the sentence was confirmed by the Military Collegium on 1 August 1938, when he was shot and buried at the NKVD special site Kommunarka. Historian Eduard Makarevich, who has seen the investigation file, states that the condemned man was shot on 21 August 1938. In 1955 his daughter Nora petitioned for rehabilitation, but the Main Military Procuracy refused to revise the case, ruling that the conviction for belonging to an anti-Soviet organization was unfounded while his guilt for the systematic violation of socialist legality in the NKVD was fully proven. Relatives were refused again in 2001; a rehabilitation decision of 22 January 2013 was overturned on 27 August 2013 by the Russian Supreme Court, which recognized him as not subject to rehabilitation.