Yagoda – The Builder. Every machine needs an engineer. The Soviet terror had one: Genrikh Yagoda, the man who helped turn the camps into an economy. Born in 1891 in a provincial town on the Volga, he joined the Cheka in 1919 and climbed quietly. He was no theorist and no orator – he was an organizer. By the end of the 1920s, with his chief often ill, Yagoda was the one actually running the secret police. His machine ran on one idea: prisoners are not a cost. They are a workforce. In 1930, the camps were brought under a centralized administration whose name the world would later learn: the Gulag. Deported peasants, "class enemies," priests and engineers were sent to dig, mine and cut timber in places no free man would willingly go. The camps became a slave economy, with production targets like those of any other state enterprise. His showpiece was the White Sea–Baltic Canal: more than 200 kilometres dug by prisoners through the frozen north, largely with shovels, wheelbarrows and primitive tools, in under two years. Thousands died. And when the canal was finished, it was too shallow for most large ships. In 1933, more than a hundred Soviet writers were taken on a boat trip along the canal. With Maxim Gorky as a leading editor, they produced a book celebrating the supposed transformation of prisoners into new Soviet citizens through forced labour. Useful idiots, by the boatload. The regime even named a brand of cigarettes after the canal: Belomorkanal. Russians still smoke them. The plans grew. In February 1933, Yagoda proposed deporting another two million people classified as socially harmful elements to Siberia and Kazakhstan. That spring, thousands of deportees were dumped on an island in the Ob River with virtually nothing to sustain them. Within weeks, thousands had died. Some survivors resorted to cannibalism. The place became known as Cannibal Island. And the Poles? In 1933, the Soviet secret police pursued an alleged Polish Military Organization inside the USSR. The supposed conspiracy would later become a pretext for the mass murder of Poles under NKVD Order 00485 in 1937–38, when over 111,000 people were executed. Yagoda helped build the apparatus and cultivate the imaginary enemy. His successor, Yezhov, presided over the mass killings. In 1934, Yagoda became head of the newly established NKVD. In 1936, the first great Moscow Show Trial took place under his watch. Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin’s old comrades, confessed to fabricated crimes and were shot. Yagoda reportedly kept the bullets that killed them as souvenirs. It wasn’t enough. That September, Stalin sent a telegram accusing Yagoda of failing to unmask the enemies of the state and declaring that the secret police were "four years behind." He was demoted, then arrested. A search of his homes uncovered luxury goods and thousands of pornographic photographs – a remarkable collection for a man who had spent years enforcing the morality of the proletarian state. At his own show trial in 1938, the builder of the machine confessed to a series of crimes, including poisoning Maxim Gorky, the writer who had helped celebrate the canal. He rejected only one charge, espionage: "If I had been a spy," he said, "dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services." He was shot in March 1938. The bullets that had killed Zinoviev and Kamenev were reportedly found among Yezhov’s possessions when he, too, was arrested. The machine tends to come back for its builders.