Agranov was born in 1893 in a
Jewish shopkeeper's family in Checherskaya, a village in the
Mogilev Governorate of the
Russian Empire. In 1912 he joined the
Socialist Revolutionary Party while working as a clerk and in 1915 joined the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was arrested by the tsarist police in 1915 and exiled to Yenesei province. In 1918, Agranov became secretary of
Sovnarkom. At this time he was taking orders directly from
Vladimir Lenin and
Felix Dzerzhinsky. During this period Agranov was put in charge of compiling the lists of intellectuals for the
forced exile of leading figures of Russian sciences and culture that were seen as the anti-Soviet element. Among those expelled were
Nikolai Berdyaev and
Nikolai Lossky. In 1921, Agranov was the chief investigator into the "
Petrograd military organization", allegedly headed by
Vladimir Tagantsev. Tagantsev was arrested and then tricked into giving names 300 "conspirators", who, he was told, would not be executed. Agranov also investigated the
Kronstadt rebellion and the
peasant uprising in Tambov region. At the end of his career he led the
Trial of the Twenty One against the
Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, the
"Promparty" and "Working Peasant Party" cases. The cynical motto "If there is no enemy, he should be created, denounced and punished" was attributed to Yakov Agranov. Agranov was also implicated in suspicions concerning the suicide of poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1930. Mayakovsky, a former lover of
Lilya Brik, shot himself with a gun given to him as a gift by Agranov, who, himself, had had a later affair with Brik, well known as the
muse of Mayakovsky. Immediately after the assassination of
Sergey Kirov in Leningrad on 1 December 1934, Agranov was entrusted with the organization of mass reprisals in the city. Stalin ordered him to fabricate a story that
Lev Kamenev,
Grigory Zinoviev and other leaders of the opposition were responsible for the murder, but he seems to have resisted, whereupon Stalin entrusted
Nikolai Yezhov with the job instead. In 1935, he was ordered by Yezhov to track down and liquidate "an undiscovered centre of Trotskyists" in Moscow, as a preparatory step for the
Great Purge that Stalin was planning. When Yezhov took over as head of the NKVD, Agranov remained his First Deputy, and in December 1936 was appointed Head of the Chief Directorate of State Security, which seemingly meant that he was to be trusted to purge the NKVD of officers Yezhov did not trust. In February 1937, he circulated among regional NKVD heads a demand for names of Trotskyists and other oppositionists employed with the state security apparatus. In April, he was demoted to the post of regional NKVD chief in
Saratov. He was arrested on 20 July 1937, and appeared on the execution list of 1 November 1937, in which his name was crossed out. He was executed by firing squad as an "
enemy of the people" on 1 August 1938. == References ==