Few are better acquainted with Stalin’s fickle, vengeful heart than the Dwarf, who demonstrated his devotion to the Communist dictator by spraying mercury on the curtains of his own office and blaming it on Genrikh Yagoda, then director of the NKVD. Yagoda was arrested, charged with treason, and dragged before a panel of judges at the last of three so-called Moscow Show Trials in March 1938, when the mercury-tainted curtains were presented as conclusive evidence that Yagoda was a German spy plotting to poison the Dwarf and perhaps Stalin too. After the judges pronounced a guilty verdict,
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