12 April] 1888 – 30 October 1937) was a leading Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet official and statesman, who for a few months was nominally second in command of the political police, the OGPU.

The attempt did not work: as one senior officer said after Yagoda had been ousted, five years later, "the entire party organisation in the OGPU was devoted to sabotaging Akulov.

[5] But after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, unlike his two deputies, Akulov objected when Stalin proposed to pin the murder on the Old Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

[6] In June 1935, he was appointed to succeed Avel Yenukidze as secretary of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the soviets, putting him in charge of security in the Kremlin, while Vyshinsky replaced him as prosecutor general.

In 1937, after Akulov had a fall while skating, and suffered a near fatal concussion, Stalin ordered that surgeons be brought from abroad to save his life.

On hearing about his arrest, one of his colleagues Valentin Trifonov, protested to the chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin who took up the case with Stalin, and was bluntly told: "You always were a liberal.