The most prominent early figure of Jewish extraction was Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, who rose to the head of the NKVD between 1934 and 1936. Born into a Jewish family in Lodz, a heavily Jewish city in the tsarist Pale of Sentiment, Yagoda rose through the ranks of the Bolsheviks' security services after the October Revolution. In his position as head of the NKVD, Yagoda oversaw the social policing of Soviet society amidst the chaos of the Five Year Plans and the Ukrainian famine. There are also several unsubstantiated rumors that he had arranged for the murder of Sergei Kirov on the behest of Stalin. Whether or not Yagoda (or Stalin via Yagoda) did murder Kirov is a highly contentious issue within Soviet historiography, with most mainstream historians such as Matthew Lenoe (see his interview here ) accepting the murder was not directed by Stalin, yet the persistence of these rumors of Yagoda's involvement among his contemporaries is a testament to the degree of power both Yagoda and the NKVD was accumulating. Yagoda was also notoriously corrupt and venal, which made him an unpopular figure among Stalin's entourage. Not surprisingly, Yagoda found himself at the receiving end of the security system he helped to erect during the Great Purges and he was executed in March 1938.

One important thing to consider with Soviet figures like Yagoda, Lazar Kaganovich, or Trotsky was that although they may have been born into a Jewish family, they frequently did not see themselves as Jewish or understood being Jewish in ways that are fundamentally different than twenty-first century Judaism. The Soviet state's attitude towards Judaism was often contradictory and hemmed and hawed between accepting Judaism as an ethnicity or condemning it as a religious practice. Although antisemitic propaganda abroad would portray those Jews like Yagoda as evidence of Jewish control over Bolshevism, Jews in leadership positions in the USSR tended to eschew any formal connection with Judaism and acculturated themselves to Russian mores.