Yakov Yakovlev

Yakov Arkadyevich Yakovlev (real name: Epstein; Russian: Я́ков Арка́дьевич Я́ковлев, 9 June 1896 – 29 July 1938) was a Soviet politician and statesman who played a central role in the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1920s.

[2] In 1921, Yakovlev was transferred to Moscow, to work for the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Education, and the Agitprop department of the Central Committee.

He ordered the Odessa Institute of Genetics to create a department to develop 'vernalisation' - a method Lysenko had devised to produce new crop varieties.

He believed Lysenko's boast, made late in 1931, that he could increase the yield on Azerbaijan wheat grown in Odessa by 40 per cent by 1934.

"[6] 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.

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.

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.

[16] In the words of the historian, Robert Conquest, it was "extraordinary transmogrification into a Rightist – an odd appellation for the man who had been chief operator in the collectivization field.