NKVD


The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated as NKVD, was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946.
First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR, the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as a commissariat of the Soviet Union in 1934. During the Great Purge in 1936–1938, on Stalin's orders, the NKVD conducted mass arrests, imprisonment, torture, and executions of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. The agency sent millions to the Gulag system of forced labor camps and, during World War II, carried out the mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians, and millions of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus, to remote areas of the country, resulting in millions of deaths. Hundreds of thousands of NKVD personnel served in Internal Troops divisions in defensive battles alongside the Red Army, as well as in "blocking formations," preventing retreat. The agency was responsible for foreign assassinations, including that of Leon Trotsky.
Within 1941 and from 1943 to 1946, secret police functions were split into the People's Commissariat for State Security. In March 1946, the People's Commissariats were renamed to Ministries; the NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the NKGB became the Ministry of State Security.

History and structure

After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsarist police and set up the People's Militias. The subsequent Russian October Revolution of 1917 saw a seizure of state power led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who established a new Bolshevik regime, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Provisional Government's Ministry of Internal Affairs, formerly under Georgy Lvov and then under Nikolai Avksentiev and Alexei Niketan, turned into NKVD under a People's Commissar. 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' Militias staffed by proletarians were largely inexperienced and unqualified. Realizing that it was left with no capable security force, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR established 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 Russian socialist-communist revolution."
The Cheka was reorganized in 1922, as the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1922 the USSR formed, with the RSFSR as its largest member. The GPU became the OGPU, 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-USSR security force, the NKVD, and the OGPU was incorporated into the NKVD as the Main Directorate for State Security ; the separate NKVD of the RSFSR was not resurrected until 1946. As a result, the NKVD also took over control of all detention facilities, as well as the regular police. At various times, the NKVD had the following Chief Directorates, abbreviated as "ГУ"—Главное управление, Glavnoye upravleniye.

Yezhov era

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.
During Yezhov's time in office, the Great Purge reached its height. In the years 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million were arrested and 681,692 were executed for 'crimes against the state'. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 under Yezhov, nearly tripling in size in just two years, with at least 140,000 of these prisoners dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and the elements.
On 3 February 1941, the 4th Department of the GUGB NKVD security service responsible for the Soviet Armed Forces military counterintelligence, consisting of 12 sections and one investigation unit, was separated from the GUGB NKVD USSR.
The official liquidation of OO GUGB within NKVD was announced on 12 February by joint order No. 00151/003 of NKVD and NKGB USSR. The rest of GUGB was abolished, and staff were moved to the newly created People's Commissariat for State Security. Departments of former GUGB were renamed directorates. For example, the foreign intelligence unit known as the Foreign Department became the Foreign Directorate ; the GUGB political police unit represented by the Secret Political Department became the Secret Political Directorate, and so on. The former GUGB 4th Department, was split into three sections. One section, which handled military counterintelligence in NKVD troops became the 3rd NKVD Department, or OKR. The chief of OKR NKVD was Aleksander Belyanov.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the NKGB USSR was abolished, and on July 20, 1941, the units that formed the NKGB became part of the NKVD. The military CI was also upgraded from a department to a directorate and put in the NKVD organization as the Directorate of Special Departments, or UOO NKVD USSR. The NKVMF, however, did not return to the NKVD until January 11, 1942. It returned to NKVD control on January 11, 1942, as UOO 9th Department controlled by P. Gladkov. In April 1943, Directorate of Special Departments was transformed into SMERSH and transferred to the People's Defense and Commissariates. At the same time, the NKVD was reduced in size and duties again by converting the GUGB to an independent unit named the NKGB.
In 1946, all Soviet commissariats were renamed "ministries." Accordingly, the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR became the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the NKGB was renamed the Ministry of State Security.
In 1953, after the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, the MGB merged back into the MVD. The police and security services finally split in 1954 to become:
  • The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for the criminal militia and correctional facilities.
  • The USSR Committee for State Security, responsible for the political police, intelligence, counterintelligence, personal protection, and confidential communications.

    Main Directorates (Departments)

  • State Security
  • Workers-Peasants Militsiya
  • Border and Internal Security
  • Firefighting security
  • Correction and Labor camps
  • Other smaller departments
  • * Department of Civil Registration
  • * Financial
  • * Administration
  • * Human resources
  • * Secretariat
  • * Special assignment

    Ranking system (State Security)

In 1935–1945, the Main Directorate of State Security of NKVD had its own ranking system before it was merged into the Soviet military standardized ranking system.
;Top-level commanding staff
  • Commissioner General of State Security
  • Commissioner of State Security, 1st Class
  • Commissioner of State Security, 2nd Class
  • Commissioner of State Security, 3rd Class
  • Commissioner of State Security
;Senior commanding staff
;Mid-level commanding staff
  • Captain of State Security
  • Senior Lieutenant of State Security
  • Lieutenant of State Security
  • Junior Lieutenant of State Security
;Junior commanding staff
  • Master Sergeant of Special Service
  • Senior Sergeant of Special Service
  • Sergeant of Special Service
  • Junior Sergeant of Special Service

    NKVD activities

The main function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union through massive political repression, including authorized murders of many thousands of politicians and citizens, as well as kidnappings, assassinations, and mass deportations.

Domestic repressions

In implementation of Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of the Soviet state, 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 – special courts martial. Evidence standards were very low: a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. Use of "physical means of persuasion" 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 themselves. Hundreds of mass graves resulting from such operations were later discovered throughout the country. Evidence exists that the NKVD committed mass extrajudicial executions, guided by secret "plans." Those plans established the number and proportion of victims in a given region. 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 decisions of the Politburo of the Communist Party. Some examples are the campaigns among engineers, party and military elite plots, and medical staff. Gas vans were used in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge in the cities of Moscow, Ivanovo, and Omsk
A number of mass operations of the NKVD related to persecution of entire 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 in the Soviet Union thronged the gates of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to plead for new U.S. passports to leave the USSR, none were issued. Instead, the NKVD promptly arrested the Americans, who were all 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. However, the people of the Soviet Republics were still the majority of NKVD victims.
The NKVD also served as an arm of the Russian Soviet communist government for lethal mass persecution and destruction of ethnic minorities and religious beliefs, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholics, Islam, Judaism, and other religious organizations, an operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov.