Mass operations of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD)Vadim Rogovin "The Party of the Executed" (1997) , Chapter 1: "Mass Operations" targeted specific categories of people during the Great Purge. Each was normally launched by an order of the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov.
The national operations made up one of the three mass operations of the Yezhovshchina, alongside the "kulak" operation and the "militia" operation against criminals and other "socially harmful elements". A total of 340,000 to 350,000 people were sentenced, of whom 140,000 were targeted in the Polish operation and about 55,000 in the German one. 247,157 were executed, a larger percentage than overall for the Great Purge.
National operations of the NKVD
The operations targeted "foreign" ethnicities, those with cross-border ties to foreign nation-states, unlike the nationally targeted deportations of World War II. According to historian Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin became concerned about rearguard uprisings of the kind seen in the Spanish Civil War and believed that "nationalities of foreign governments" posed a threat in border regions, even if they were Soviet citizens whose ancestors had sometimes lived decades or centuries in the areas controlled by the Soviet Union.
Minutes of the January 31, 1938 Politburo meeting list the following ethnicities against which NKVD operations were to be continued: Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Harbinites, Chinese, and Romanians. It was also suggested to carry out similar NKVD operations against Bulgarians and Macedonians.Выписка из протокола заседания Политбюро ЦК ВКП(б) о продлении операции против поляков, латышей, немцев, эстонцев, финнов, греков, иранцев, харбинцев, китайцев и румын. 31 января 1938 г.
Between August 1937 and October 1938 the NKVD arrested 335,513 people in the national operations and shot 247,157 of them, an estimated 34% of all victims of the Great Purge. Arrests followed ethnic lines, but the victims included Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians; conversely, repression along the "German line" was lightest among the Volga Germans, who were not perceived as foreigners, while ethnic Russians who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway and spent years abroad were targeted as "Harbinites".
Background From the early 1920s the Soviet leadership expected a major war and a new foreign intervention. Under the logic of collective responsibility, people of "foreign" nationalities were seen wholesale as a recruiting base for foreign intelligence services and as potentially disloyal to the Soviet regime. The NKVD was hunting spies and "wreckers" among the western minorities as early as 1934, while Lutheran and Catholic clergy were arrested in parallel and propaganda spread the idea of ubiquitous western spies and a "fifth column" inside the USSR.
Chronology + Key decisions of the national operations Date Instrument Substance Politburo resolution "On measures protecting the USSR from the penetration of espionage, terrorist and sabotage elements": tightened the entry of political emigrants and created a commission to purge international organisations on Soviet territory. NKVD Order No. 00439 Arrest within five days of all German subjects working at military factories, plants with defence workshops and on the railways; starting point of the German operation. NKVD Order No. 00485 Launched the Polish operation from 20 August; served as the model for the later national operations. NKVD order Romanian operation against emigrants and defectors from Romania in Moldavia and Ukraine. NKVD order "On foreigners" Ended the renewal of residence permits for citizens of 21 countries unconditionally, and of 10 more countries "where compromising material exists". NKVD Order No. 00593 Operation against the "Harbinites", former employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Yezhov telegram No. 49990 Launched the Latvian operation. Yezhov directive No. 50215 Launched the Greek operation. NKVD directive Extended the "Latvian line" procedures to Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns and Bulgarians. NKVD directive Launched the Iranian operation. Politburo resolution Extended the national operations until 15 April 1938. NKVD directive Operation against Bulgarians and Macedonians. NKVD directive Ordered arrests along the "Afghan line". Politburo resolution Ordered the defence industry purged of members of the nationalities under repression. Politburo resolution Extended the national operations until 1 August 1938. Defence Commissariat directive Discharged from the Red Army servicemen of nationalities not native to the territory of the USSR. Politburo resolution Created "special troikas" to decide the cases of people arrested along the national lines up to 1 August 1938.
Implementation Unlike the "kulak" operation, the national operations had no numerical quotas: local NKVD chiefs decided the scale of arrests themselves.
Order No. 00485 established the "album procedure" used in all the national operations. Every ten days the local "dvoika", the regional NKVD chief and the prosecutor, signed indictments with recommended sentences, bound them into albums and sent them to Moscow for approval. There, staff drew up the protocols of the "", which were signed by Yezhov and Andrey Vyshinsky. Each protocol had two columns: the left one carried the convict's personal data, the right one the decision in capital letters, ranging from execution and corrective labour camp terms to re-investigation, transfer to a court, or release under surveillance.
By September 1938 tens of thousands of unresolved album cases had piled up in Moscow. NKVD Order No. 00606 of 17 September 1938 abolished the album procedure and created "special troikas" in every republic, krai and oblast, made up of the regional NKVD chief, the prosecutor and the regional party leader. They had two months to clear the backlog, and their decisions no longer needed Moscow's confirmation.
Under the "national" orders No. 00485 and No. 00593, the Commission of the NKVD and the Prosecutor of the USSR convicted 235,122 people, of whom 172,830 were sentenced to death; 9,529 people were expelled from the USSR, 7,777 exiled within the country, 37,619 cases sent back for further investigation and 12,903 people released. Outcomes varied sharply between regions: local investigators in Novosibirsk Oblast proposed death sentences for 97 percent of the accused, while in Omsk Oblast the share sentenced to death was 43.6 percent. In total, between the first album of 25 August 1937 and 17 November 1938, the album procedure and the special troikas decided the cases of 346,713 people, of whom 335,513 were convicted and 247,157 sentenced to be shot, 73.66 percent of those convicted.
In telegraph correspondence, NKVD officers used coded language: prisoners were called "blanks", and executions were disguised as reports on the "slaughter of livestock". Local initiative could go far. An operational group under Boris Kulvets, sent to the Bodaybo district of Irkutsk Oblast in early 1938, arrested about four thousand people, seizing the local Chinese and Korean population wholesale from lists of "persons of foreign origin". Of those arrested, 938 were shot in Bodaybo in 1938; Kulvets was himself arrested after Yezhov's fall.
Individual operations + Outcomes of the national operations by "line" Operation Convicted Executed Notes Polish 139,835 111,091 The largest operation German 55,005 41,898 65,000–68,000 arrested in total Harbin 46,317 30,992 Mostly ethnic Russian returnees from Harbin Latvian 21,300 16,575 Björn M. Felder: Lettland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. p. 72. Iranian 13,297 2,046 Greek 12,557 10,545 Estimates of all Greeks killed or disappeared range from 20,000 to 50,000 Finnish 11,066 9,078 Estimates of all Finnish victims range from 8,000 to 25,000 Estonian 9,735 7,998 Romanian 8,292 5,439 Afghan 1,557 366 Chinese 3,932 Executions concentrated in August–November 1938; accompanied by deportations Korean Deportation rather than an "album" operation; an estimated 40,000 deathsPohl, J. Otto (1999), Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949, Greenwood, page 13-14
Poles
The Polish operation was the largest of the national operations, and Order No. 00485 served as the model for the others. It ordered the arrest of remaining members of the Polish Military Organisation, all former prisoners of war of the Polish army still in the USSR, defectors from Poland regardless of when they had crossed, political emigrants and prisoner exchangees from Poland, former members of the Polish Socialist Party and other Polish parties, and "the most active part of local anti-Soviet nationalist elements" in Polish districts. Okhotin and Roginsky explain its scale by Poland's standing as the neighbour perceived as most dangerous throughout the 1920s and 1930s, by the entrenched myth of Polish perfidy, and by the fact that the USSR had more defectors from Poland and more residents of Polish nationality than of any other "foreign" nationality except Germans; in their analysis, the criterion of guilt was not nationality as such but birth in, residence in, or any tie to the country concerned.
The scale of the alleged espionage bore no relation to the real thing: NKVD files record about 102,000 "Polish spies" uncovered in 1937–1938, many of them in Siberia, while declassified records of the Central Military Archive in Warsaw show that Polish intelligence then ran no more than 200 agents worldwide. The Polish Military Organisation itself was presented as a live conspiracy allegedly founded by Józef Piłsudski, and Russian archives record cases of arrested Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians being forced to "confess" that they were Poles. Political emigrants who had fled to the USSR were hit especially hard; the defector Walter Krivitsky recalled the case of Tomasz Dąbal, exchanged to Moscow from a Polish prison and welcomed in triumph, then shot in the late 1930s as an alleged agent of Polish military intelligence.
Prosecution along the "Polish line" was not limited to ethnic Poles. Of 36,768 people convicted along this line in September–November 1938, 20,147 were Poles, 5,215 Belarusians, 4,991 Ukrainians, 3,235 Russians and 1,122 Jews, alongside smaller numbers of Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians and others. In total the operation convicted 139,835 people, of whom 111,091 were shot; about 16 percent of all Poles living in the USSR ended up imprisoned.
Germans
Although Yezhov's order on the arrest of German subjects dates from 25 July 1937, the German operation proper began after Order No. 00485 and followed the Polish model. The first targets were the standard "suspect" categories: political emigrants, defectors, former prisoners of war, people who received letters or parcels from Germany, visitors to German consulates, and participants in emigrant and cultural organisations. Once the card files on these groups were exhausted, NKVD officers arrested people for their German nationality alone, or on the suspicion of it. In total 65,000–68,000 people were arrested in the German operation and 55,005 convicted, of whom 41,898 were shot and 13,107 sentenced to camps, exile or expulsion. Some emigrants from Germany were handed over to Nazi Germany: Ernst Fabisch, a former member of the Communist Party of Germany youth organisation, was deported in January 1938, arrested by the Gestapo at the border and killed in Auschwitz in 1943.
Latvians