History
NKVD
The NKVD, or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, was the leading Soviet security and police organization during the Stalinist era. It was responsible for state security, intelligence, and law enforcement, and played a key role in political repression, mass arrests, and executions. The NKVD was notorious for its brutal tactics and played a significant role in maintaining Stalin's authoritarian regime.
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6 Key excerpts on "NKVD"
eBook - PDF- Olga B. Semukhina, Kenneth Michael Reynolds(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
During the years 1917–1918, the NKVD was rebuilding its departments and subdepartments and creating a new centralized apparatus. The functions of new departments within the MVD strikingly resembled the functions of the tsarist MVD prior to the February revolution. This was an executive agency that combined tremendous controlling, policing, and administrative duties. By June of 1918, the NKVD created 11 departments and hired over 400 staff members, who were responsible for the local self-administration, statistics, finances, medical aid, veterinary affairs, agriculture, immigration, foreigners, and the press (Mulukaev Malygin, and Epifanov, 2005). 9 However, the central apparatus was helpless without efficient local police, therefore, in October of 1918, the NKVD acting jointly with the People’s Commissariat of Justice ( Narkomiust ) issued a decree on the creation of a professional militia. 10 The new police forces were considered the executive agency of the local Workers and Peasant authorities and were created as a temporary measure to protect the revolutionary law and order. Unlike the previous decree, the instruction “On Organization of the Soviet Militia of Workers and Peasants” provided detailed structure, staff, sources of funding, and duties to the newly created institution. The members of the militia were appointed by the executive committees of the local Soviets of workers and peasants. The decree emphasized the class nature of the new law enforce-ment agency as the clergy, individuals who were employed in a trade, those receiving their income from nonlabor sources, individuals who employed others, and former members of the tsarist police were excluded from the Soviet police service (Fastov, 2005). The duties of the Soviet militia included numerous activities other than maintenance of public order and crime investigation.
eBook - PDFAgents of Terror
Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police
- Alexander Vatlin, Seth Bernstein(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- University of Wisconsin Press(Publisher)
The first was to suppress the “incursions” of former kulaks in the coun- tryside. The second was to provide security for the district’s armament factories. When the newly formed NKVD inherited and expanded the functions of the OGPU in 1934, district offices became the core of the ap- paratus of security and control over the population in the Soviet Union. In addition to secret police work, they controlled the ordinary police and its subdivisions, the fire department and registration services. 17 As part of these reforms, the policing functions of the OGPU became the responsibility of the NKVD’s Chief Administration of State Security (GUGB), with subdivisions in all republics, territories, and provinces. The district office of the NKVD had operative workers who studied the mood of the population, conducted work with informants, and under- took investigations into political cases. 18 Soon the work of these opera- tives overwhelmed all other functions of the NKVD. Bureaucratic cor- respondence during the period of mass repression sometimes referred to the district office as the “district department of the administration of state security,” reflecting the dominance of the secret police within Kuntsevo’s NKVD. Until the summer of 1937—the start of the mass operations—political cases generally prevailed over mass-social categorization as state secu- rity agents searched for “anti-Soviet elements.” Agents investigated individual members of former oppositions within the Bolshevik party, prerevolutionary political figures, and members of non-Bolshevik parties who were too active in public affairs or had retained old connections. Still another category of victims in the first stages of repression was nomenklatura workers—ranking members of Soviet officialdom. These administrators, above all those who worked in the economic sphere, fre- quently faced accusations of being hidden saboteurs when their enter- prises failed to fulfill the state’s plans.
eBook - ePubPhotography and Political Repressions in Stalin's Russia
Defacing the Enemy
- Denis Skopin(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Suffice it to remind that all three persons who headed the secret police during Stalin's rule shared the same destiny, namely they were arrested and executed one after another. The specific feature of Stalin's terror resided in the fact that the repressive machine targeted not only the population, but also worked against itself. 23 Some recent scholarly publications have shed light on the scale of repressions among NKVD operational workers. Purges in their ranks were so considerable that they finally led to the radical renewal of the staff: “No organ proved to be spared, not even the People's Commissariat of the Interior (NKVD) in which several generations of Chekist functionaries had been replaced between 1934 and 1941. The renewal of the NKVD staff before and after the ‘Great Terror' is so important that it is not an exaggeration to speak about a real revolution.” 24 The self-repressions carried out by the NKVD led to a considerable rejuvenation of cadres and diminishing of the part of “foreign nationals” within the secret police staff. This second tendency is observed mostly in relation to workers of Jewish, Latvian or Polish origin who constituted a very important part of the NKVD officers before the wave of internal repressions. 25 The realization of the large-scale repressions of Soviet citizens that coincided with the period when Yezhov was the head of the NKVD was commissioned to the most poorly educated agents. 26 The secret police bosses especially valued the workers who had erred in the past, since they were prepared to execute any order given by the superiors who knew about their faults. 27 This generation of operational workers, in turn, was replaced by another immediately after their mission had been fulfilled. As pointed out by Nikita Petrov, “we can see clearly to whom Stalin commissioned realization of the mass terror: he relied on half-educated executors
eBook - PDFStalin
A New History
- Sarah Davies, James Harris(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The position’s significance was greatly diminished by the fact that its portfolio did not cover the major non- Russian areas of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia, which were formally independent Soviet republics whose relations with the RSFSR were conducted, at the state level, through the Council of Peoples’ Commissars (Sovnarkom) and the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID), but whose leaders were in practice subordinated to the 45 authority of the Central Committee of the RKP(b). Compared with Stalin’s other positions as a Politburo and Secretariat member, head of the Workers and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), and a senior Commissar in the Red Army, and especially following his appointment as General Secretary of the RKP(b) in 1922, the post of Commissar held relatively less importance to him personally and to his leading colleagues. Secondly, Stalin played little direct role in the day-to-day affairs of Narkomnats for much of the time, rarely attending meetings of its Collegium and in effect leaving it in the hands of a series of deputies, most important among them Stanislav Pestkovskii and then Semen Dimanshtein. His role on the southern front in the Civil War and his other duties left him little time for his formal role in the Soviet govern- ment. Thirdly, Stalin’s authority as an expert on nationality affairs was always going to be dwarfed by that of Lenin, author of ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ and chief rapporteur on nationality affairs at RKP(b) and Comintern conferences and congresses until his incapacitation towards the end of 1922. Consequently, most historians have viewed Stalin’s role as Commissar from 1918–22 as either that of obedient servant to the master, Lenin, or as Lenin’s secretive opponent on the national question who finally came out of the woodwork in the autumn of 1922.
eBook - PDFA Biography of No Place
From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland
- Kate Brown, Kate BROWN(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
By de-porting and arresting, the NKVD interrogators helped draw the lines of social discrimination to determine the new parameters for the consolidat-ing and legitimizing Soviet state. Benedict Anderson writes that nation-states are formed as people cease to see themselves as part of contained communities of people who know each other by sight and begin to imagine themselves as members of an ab-The Great Purges and the Rights of Man 161 stract nationality stretching across homogenous time and space. 26 But the Soviet case raises two questions. Who exactly does the imagining? And who gets imagined off the map? In the Soviet Union, first ethnographers in the twenties and then security agents in the thirties imagined people into national groups affixed to geographical space. By 1938 these categories were legally fixed. People could no longer determine their own national-ity. 27 Postmodern theorists have rightly asserted that identities are fluid and fragmented, but abstract identities can also be affixed to bodies like a pair of cement shoes before the proverbial swim in the river. The Great Purges illustrate how to name is to possess, sometimes with fatal conse-quences. Confessional Rites Among Soviet citizens netted in the search for Polish agents was sixty-one-year-old Maria Vladkovskaia. Vladkovskaia’s case demonstrates how se-curity officials evoked national communities into existence as a way of sending nationalized bodies out of existence. In July of 1937, Maria was arrested in the town of Belia Tserkiv and questioned by the NKVD inves-tigator Khodorkovskii. Vladkovskaia, born in a borderland village near Kam’ianetz-Podolskyi, had been exiled in the purges of the border zone. She was categorized as a Soviet citizen of Polish descent and had rudimen-tary reading skills. She was sentenced with sixteen other women as a Polish spy and shot as an enemy of the people on August 31, 1937 (three weeks af-ter the Polish operation began).
eBook - ePub- Cathie Carmichael, Richard C. Maguire, Cathie Carmichael, Richard C. Maguire(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
kulaks, criminals, anti-Soviet elements and so on. However, they sharply criticized the ‘mistakes’ made by the NKVD and the public prosecutors. These mistakes, they admitted, resulted in the ‘violation of the revolutionary legitimacy’. In their opinion, such problems were inspired by enemies, who managed to infiltrate the NKVD and the prosecution office, thus decreasing Party control over both institutions.During the first half of 1938 alone, the Communist-Bolshevik regime hid the evidence of its crimes by executing about 700 employees of the NKVD, who were involved in the Purges. This was because, first, Stalin did not want living witnesses to the crimes; second, local Soviet authorities also tried to blame others for their crimes; third, new odious figures were striving for power. In particular, these figures were Lavrentii Beria and Andrei Vyshynskii, who reached the highest ranks in the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s office of the USSR respectively. Both of them were looking for any means to destroy their opponents. For example, the Head of the Ukrainian NKVD Vsevolod Balytskyi was shot on 27 November 1937. His successors both met violent ends: Israel’ Leplevs’kyi was shot on 28 July 1938, and Oleksander Uspens’kyi, who faked his own suicide in Kiev on 14 November 1938, was tracked down and shot on 27 January 1940. The same fate awaited many of the highest officers of the NKVD, who were blamed for the supposed excesses, which were in fact the substance of Stalin’s policy. Soviet socialism had become a tyranny where the tyrant’s power was demonstrated by his mastery of the politics of his own court.61As we can see, the joint decision of the state and political structures of the Soviet Union on 17 November 1938 not only stopped the Great Terror, but also placed all responsibility for the Purges on the NKVD. In this way, the leadership of the country tried to avoid taking responsibility for the ‘genocide actions’ (to use Norman Naimark’s terminology)62
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