The head of the NKVD, Genrik Yagoda, was removed from his post for liberalism.
There is a very interesting publication of 500 pages of documents on the political biography of Yagoda and his activities - "Genrik Yagoda. The People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, the General Commissioner for State Security. Collection of documents. Kazan, 1997. " "With an activist of the NKVD party in 1937, in the presence of the new commissar Yezhov, the Yaguda case was examined. The workers began to recall that their former leader had created liberal conditions in political isolation wards, where Trotskyists and other counter-revolutionaries served their sentences. In political isolation cells they had arguments with friends, drank with friends, read with friends, had arguments with family. A volleyball game, security officers chased after the balls that flew off the court. This is the kind of liberalism that Goda spread."