I
will introduce the NKVD, Stalin’s Secret Police Force. They are similar to
Hitler’s Gestapo. I will post the information about them from Wikipedia.
NKVD (НКВД)
People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs |
Народный комиссариат
внутренних дел
Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del |
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The emblem of the NKVD
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Agency
overview
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Formed
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1934
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Preceding Agency
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NKVD of the RSFSR
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Dissolved
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1946
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Superseding agency
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Type
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Secret police
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Jurisdiction
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law enforcement
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Headquarters
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Lubyanka
Square, Moscow
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Agency executives
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Genrikh Yagoda (1934–1936)
Nikolai Yezhov (1936–1938) Lavrentiy Beria (1938–1945) |
Parent agency
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The
People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Народный
комиссариат внутренних дел,
Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del), abbreviated NKVD (НКВД) was a law enforcement agency of the Soviet Union that directly executed the
rule of power of the All
Union Communist Party. It was closely associated with the Soviet secret police, which at times was part of
the agency, and is known for its political
repression during the era of Joseph Stalin.
The
NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR, including traffic police, firefighting, border guards and archives. It is best known for the
activities of the Gulag and the Main
Directorate for State Security (GUGB), the predecessor of the KGB.
The NKVD conducted mass extrajudicial
executions, ran the Gulag system of forced labor camps and suppressed
underground resistance, and was also responsible for mass deportations of entire
nationalities and Kulaks to unpopulated
regions of the country. It was also tasked with protection of Soviet
borders and espionage, which
included political
assassinations abroad, influencing foreign governments and enforcing
Stalinist policy within communist movements
in other countries.
History
and structure
Main
articles: Cheka and Chronology
of Soviet secret police agencies
After
the Russian February Revolution
of 1917, the Provisional
Government dissolved the Tsar's police and created People's
Militsiya. The October Revolution
established a new Bolshevik regime, the
Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), and the Ministry
of Internal Affairs (MVD) turned into NKVD (People's Commissariat of
Internal Affairs). However, the NKVD apparatus was overwhelmed by duties
inherited from MVD, such as the supervision of the local governments and
firefighting, and the Workers' and Peasants' Militsiya staffed by
proletarians was largely inexperienced. Realizing that it was left with no
capable security force, the Council
of People's Commissars of the RSFSR created a secret political
police, the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. It gained the right to
undertake quick non-judicial trials and executions, if that was deemed
necessary in order to "protect the revolution".
The
Cheka was reorganized in 1922 as the State
Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1923,
the USSR was formed with the RSFSR as its
largest member. The GPU became the OGPU (Joint State
Political Directorate), under the Council
of People's Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD of the RSFSR retained
control of the militsiya, and various other responsibilities.
In
1934, the NKVD of the RSFSR was transformed into an all-union security force,
the NKVD of the USSR (which the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union leaders soon came to call "the
leading detachment of our party"), and the OGPU was incorporated into the
NKVD as the Main
Directorate for State Security (GUGB); the separate NKVD of the
RSFSR was not resurrected until 1946 (as the MVD of the RSFSR). As a result,
the NKVD also became responsible for all detention facilities (including the
forced labor camps, known as the GULag) as well as for the
regular police. Until the reorganization begun by Nikolai Yezhov with a purge of the regional
political police in the autumn of 1936 and formalized by a May 1939 directive
of the All-Union NKVD by which all appointments to the local political police
were controlled from the center, there was frequent tension between centralized
control of local units and the collusion of those units with local and regional
party elements, frequently resulting in the thwarting of Moscow's plans.
Since
its creation in 1934, the NKVD of the USSR underwent many organizational
changes; between 1938 and 1939 alone, the NKVD's structure changed three times.
On
February 3, 1941, the Special Sections of the NKVD responsible for military counterintelligence (CI) became part of the Army
and Navy (RKKA and RKKF, respectively). The GUGB was separated
from the NKVD and renamed the "People's Commissariat for State
Security" (NKGB). After the German invasion,
the NKVD and NKGB were reunited on 20 July 1941. The CI sections were returned
to the NKVD in January 1942. In April 1943, the CI sections were again
transferred to the People's Commissariats (Narkomat) of Defense and the Navy,
becoming SMERSH (from Smert' Shpionam or
"Death to Spies"); at the same time, the NKVD was again separated
from the NKGB.
In
1946, all Soviet Commissariats were renamed "ministries".
Accordingly, the NKVD of the USSR was renamed as the Ministry of Internal
Affairs (MVD), while the NKGB was renamed as the Ministry of State Security
(MGB). In 1953, after the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, the MGB was merged back
into the MVD. The police and security services were finally split in 1954 to
become:
- The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), responsible for the criminal militia and correctional facilities.
- The USSR Committee for State Security (KGB), responsible for the political police, intelligence, counter-intelligence, personal protection (of the leadership) and confidential communications.
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Genrikh Yagoda, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and
Feliks Dzierżyński, 1924
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Picture of Dzerzhinsky is held in a Soviet
Parade in Moscow, 1936. The picute is carried by Dynamo athletes.
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NKVD
activities
The
main function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet
Union. This function was successfully accomplished through massive political
repression, including sanctioned international operations which involved
political murders, kidnappings and assassinations.
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The OGPU-Directors Genrikh Yagoda and N.
Filatov on the building-site of the Moskva-Volga-canal. Nikita Khrushchev is
left behind Yagoda. (September 3, 1935)
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Domestic
repressions and executions
For
detailed articles on the issue, see Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union.
In
implementing Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of the Soviet
state ("enemies of the
people"), untold multitudes of people were sent to GULAG camps
and hundreds of thousands were executed by the NKVD. Formally, most of these
people were convicted by NKVD troikas
("triplets")– special courts martial. Evidential standards were
very low: a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds
for arrest. Use of "physical means of persuasion" (torture) was
sanctioned by a special decree of the state, which opened the door to numerous
abuses, documented in recollections of victims and members of the NKVD itself.
Hundreds of mass
graves resulting from such operations were later discovered
throughout the country. Documented evidence exists that the NKVD committed mass
extrajudicial executions, guided by secret "plans". Those plans
established the number and proportion of victims (officially "public
enemies") in a given region (e.g. the quotas for clergy, former nobles etc., regardless of identity). The
families of the repressed, including children, were also automatically
repressed according to NKVD Order no. 00486.
The
purges were organized in a number of waves according to the decisions of the Politburo of the Communist Party. Some
examples are the campaigns among engineers (Shakhty Trial), party and military elite
plots (Great Purge with Order 00447),
and medical staff ("Doctors' Plot").
A
number of mass
operations of the NKVD were related to the prosecution of whole
ethnic categories. For example, the Polish
Operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938 resulted in the execution of
111,091 Poles. Whole populations of certain ethnicities were
forcibly resettled. Foreigners living in the Soviet Union were given
particular attention. When disillusioned American citizens living in the Soviet
Union thronged the gates of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to plead for new U.S.
passports to leave USSR (Stalin had taken their original U.S. passports for
'registration' purposes years before), none were issued. Instead, the NKVD
promptly arrested all of the Americans, who were taken to Lubyanka Prison and later shot. American
factory workers at the Soviet Ford GAZ plant, suspected by
Stalin of being 'poisoned' by Western influences, were dragged off with the
others to Lubyanka by the NKVD in the very same Ford Model A
cars they had helped build, where they were tortured; nearly all were executed
or died in labor camps. Many of the slain Americans were dumped in the mass
grave at Yuzhnoye Butovo
District near Moscow. Even so, ethnic Russians still formed the majority of NKVD
victims.
At the time when the NKVD was killing members of national minorities, most of its leading officers were themselves members of national minorities. In 1937 and 1938, NKVD officers, many of whom were of Jewish, Latvian, Polish, or German nationality, were implementing policies of national killing that exceeded anything that Hitler and his SS had (yet) attempted. ... When the mass killing of the Great Terror began, about a third of the high-ranking NKVD officers were Jewish by nationality.
The
NKVD also served as the Soviet government's arm for the lethal persecution of Judaism, the Russian Orthodox
Church, the Greek
Catholics, the Latin Catholics,
Islam and other religious organizations, an
operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov.
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Lavrentiy Beria with Stalin (in background)
and Stalin's daughter Svetlana
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International
operations, kidnappings, and assassinations
During
the 1930s, the NKVD was responsible for political murders of those Stalin
believed to oppose him. Espionage networks headed by experienced multilingual
NKVD officers such as Pavel Sudoplatov
and Iskhak Akhmerov
were established in nearly every major Western country, including the United
States. The NKVD recruited agents for its espionage efforts from all walks of
life, from unemployed intellectuals such as Mark Zborowski to aristocrats such as Martha Dodd. Besides the gathering of
intelligence, these networks provided organizational assistance for so-called wet
business, where enemies of the USSR either disappeared or were openly
liquidated.
The
NKVD's intelligence and special operations (Inostranny Otdel)
unit organized overseas assassinations of political enemies of the USSR, such
as leaders of nationalist movements, former Tsarist officials, and personal
rivals of Joseph Stalin. Among the officially confirmed victims of such plots
were:
- Leon Trotsky, a personal political enemy of Stalin and his most bitter international critic, killed in Mexico City in 1940;
- Yevhen Konovalets, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists ; assassinated in Rotterdam, Netherlands
- Yevgeny Miller, former General of the Tsarist (Imperial Russian) Army; in the 1930s, he was responsible for funding anti-communist movements inside the USSR with the support of European governments. Kidnapped in Paris and brought to Moscow, where he was interrogated and executed
- Noe Ramishvili, Prime Minister of independent Georgia, fled to France after the Bolshevik takeover; responsible for funding and coordinating Georgian nationalist organizations and the August Uprising, he was assassinated in Paris
- Boris Savinkov, Russian revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik terrorist (lured back into Russia and killed in 1924 by the Trust Operation of the GPU);
- Sidney Reilly, British agent of the MI6 who deliberately entered Russia in 1925 trying to expose the Trust Operation to avenge Savinkov's death;
- Alexander Kutepov, former General of the Tsarist (Imperial Russian) Army, who was active in organizing anti-communist groups with the support of French and British governments
Prominent
political dissidents were also killed found dead under highly suspicious
circumstances, including Walter Krivitsky,
Lev Sedov, Ignace Reiss and former German Communist
Party (KPD) member Willi Münzenberg.
The
pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang received NKVD assistance in
conducting a purge to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge in 1937. Sheng and the Soviets
alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite
plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. The Soviet Consul General Garegin
Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, the official
leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged
conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang came under virtual Soviet control. Stalin
opposed the Chinese Communist Party.
Spanish
Civil War
During
the Spanish Civil War, NKVD agents, acting in
conjunction with the Communist Party of Spain, exercised
substantial control over the Republican government, using Soviet military
aid to help further Soviet influence. The NKVD established numerous secret
prisons around the capital Madrid, which were used to detain, torture, and kill hundreds
of the NKVD's enemies, at first focusing on Spanish
Nationalists and Spanish Catholics, while from late 1938
increasingly anarchists and Trotskyists were the objects of persecution. In June,
1937 Andrés
Nin, the secretary of the Trotskyst POUM, was tortured
and killed in an NKVD prison.
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The first page of Beria's
notice (oversigned by Stalin and other high-ranking Politburo members), to
kill approximately 25,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn
Forest and other places in the Soviet Union.
English: The
accepted proposal of Lavrentiy Beria to execute former Polish army and
police officers in NKVD prisoner of war camps and prisons. March 1940.
TOP SECRET
From the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to comrade STALIN
In the NKVD
POW camps and in the prisons of the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belorussia
there is currently a large number of former officers of the Polish army, former
Polish police officers and employees of intelligence agencies, members of
Polish nationalist c-r (counterrevolutionary) parties, participants in
underground c-r rebel organizations, defectors and so on. All of them are
implacable enemies of Soviet power and full of hatred for the Soviet system.
POW officers
and policemen located in the camps are attempting to continue c-r work and are
leading anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is simply waiting to be freed so
they can have the opportunity to actively join the fight against Soviet power.
NKVD agents
in the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belorussia have uncovered a number of c-r
rebel organizations. In each of these c-r organizations the former officers of
the former Polish army and former Polish police officers played an active
leadership role.
Among the
detained defectors and violators of the state-
(Signatures:
In favor - Stalin,
Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan)
(In margin: Comrade Kalinin - In favor. Comrade Kaganovich - In favor.)
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World
War II operations
Prior
to the German invasion, in order to accomplish its own goals, the NKVD was
prepared to cooperate even with such organizations as the German Gestapo. In
March 1940 representatives of the NKVD and the Gestapo met for one week in
Zakopane, to coordinate the pacification of Poland; see Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. For its
part, the Soviet Union delivered hundreds of German and Austrian Communists to
the Gestapo, as unwanted foreigners, together with their documents. However,
many NKVD units were later to fight the Wehrmacht, for example the 10th Rifle
Division NKVD, which fought at the Battle of Stalingrad.
During
World War II, NKVD Internal Troops units were used for rear area security,
including the deterrence of desertion through Stalin's Order
No. 270 and Order No. 227 decrees in 1941 and 1942, which aimed
to raise troop morale via brutality and coercion. At the beginning of the war
the NKVD formed 15 rifle divisions, which had expanded by 1945 to 53 divisions
and 28 brigades. A list of identified NKVD Internal Troops divisions can be
seen at List of Soviet Union divisions. Though mainly intended for internal
security, NKVD divisions were sometimes used in the front-lines, for example
during the Battle of Stalingrad and the breakthrough in Crimea. Unlike the Waffen-SS,
the NKVD did not field any armored or mechanized units.
The
NKVD also executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners in
1939–1941, inter alia committing Katyń
massacre. In liberated and occupied territories the NKVD and (later) NKGB
carried out mass arrests, deportations, and executions. The targets included
both collaborators with Germany, non-Communist resistance movements such as the Polish Armia
Krajowa and Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and
anti-Communist post-war resistance, such as Baltic Forest
Brothers. the anti-partisan war of NKVD against the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army and Forest Brothers lasted until early 1950s.
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The corpses of victims of Soviet NKVD
murdered in last days of June 1941, just after outbreak of German-Soviet War (NKVD prisoner massacres) and escape of
Red Army and NKVD troops from the cities. Here: Lwów, citizens of
Lwów are looking for their friends and relatives, previously arrested by NKVD
and kept in prison.
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Postwar
operations
After
the death of Stalin in 1953, the new Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev halted the NKVD purges. From the 1950s to the 1980s, thousands
of victims were legally "rehabilitated" (i.e., acquitted and had
their rights restored). Many of the victims and their relatives refused to
apply for rehabilitation out of fear or lack of documents. The rehabilitation
was not complete: in most cases the formulation was "due to lack of
evidence of the case of crime", a Soviet legal jargon that effectively
said "there was a crime, but unfortunately we cannot prove it". Only
a limited number of persons were rehabilitated with the formulation
"cleared of all charges".
Very
few NKVD agents were ever officially convicted of the particular violation of
anyone's rights. Legally, those agents executed in the 1930s were also
"purged" without legitimate criminal investigations and court
decisions. In the 1990s and 2000s (decade) a small number of ex-NKVD agents
living in the Baltic states were convicted of crimes against the local
population.
At
present, living former agents retain generous pensions and privileges
established by the USSR and later confirmed by all of the member countries of
the Commonwealth of Independent States. They have not been prosecuted in any
way, although some have been identified by their victims.
Intelligence
activities
These
included:
·
Establishment
of a widespread spy network through the Comintern.
·
Operations
of Richard Sorge, the "Red Orchestra", Willi Lehmann, and other
agents who provided valuable intelligence during World War II.
·
Recruitment
of important U.K. officials as agents in the 1940s.
·
Penetration
of British intelligence (MI6) and counter-intelligence (MI5) services.
·
Collection
of detailed nuclear weapons design information from the U.S. and Britain.
·
Disruption
of several confirmed plots to assassinate Stalin.
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Establishment
of the People's Republic of Poland and earlier its communist party along with
training activists, during World War II. The first President of Poland after
the war was Bolesław Bierut, an NKVD agent.
Soviet
economy
The
extensive system of labor exploitation in the Gulag made a notable
contribution to the Soviet economy and the development of remote areas.
Colonization of Siberia, the North and Far East was among the explicitly stated
goals in the very first laws concerning Soviet labor camps.
Mining, construction works (roads, railways, canals, dams, and factories),
logging, and other functions of the labor camps were part of the Soviet planned
economy, and the NKVD had its own production plans.
The
most unusual part of the NKVD's achievements was its role in Soviet science and
arms development. Many scientists and engineers arrested for political crimes
were placed in special prisons, much more comfortable than the Gulag,
colloquially known as sharashkas. These prisoners continued their work in
these prisons. When later released, some of them became world leaders in
science and technology. Among such sharashka members were Sergey
Korolev, the head designer of the Soviet rocket program and first human space
flight mission in 1961, and Andrei
Tupolev, the famous airplane designer. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also imprisoned
in a sharashka, and based his novel The
First Circle on his experiences there.
After
World War II, the NKVD coordinated work on Soviet nuclear weaponry, under the
direction of General Pavel Sudoplatov. The scientists were not
prisoners, but the project was supervised by the NKVD because of its great importance
and the corresponding requirement for absolute security and secrecy. Also, the
project used information obtained by the NKVD from the United States.
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