Tyrants have been an obsession of mine for YEARS. I mean, any and every book my library has on these guys, I've probably read. I don't admire them, but I find them fascinating. How they become who they end up being is a major source of interest for me. Stalin, for example, killed millions of people throughout the course of his reign. How did he turn from some average seminary student in Georgia, to the man he ended up becoming? That journey is what I'm fixated on.
Stalin is of personal interest to me, mostly because he's just so... Stalin. And despite all he's credited with (both bad and good), he's still extremely polarizing.
In my research for an upcoming novel, I've had to dig a bit into some of the NKVD orders passed when Stalin was in charge, and what I've been learning is really interesting.
Specifically, NKVD order 00485.
Let me tell you about it.
The Great Purge
In 1936-1938, an event that has come to be known as the Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор), or the Great Purge, depending on who you ask (though the bulk of the killing happened in 1937, which is why it is also ominously known as 37-ой год, or "the Year of 37"). Basically, this was a period wherein Stalin enacted a bunch of repressive actions against people he saw as political enemies.
No one was safe from him. he went against peasants, communist party leaders, the military, and anyone else he could think of. In one book I read that touched on this time period, there was a mass grave found not too long ago outside of Saint Petersburg. It was out in the woods, and when people finally got to it, they discovered hundreds upon hundreds of bodies there. It turned out, so many people had died in the city, there was nowhere left to bury them, so the officials were killing people, and then throwing bodies on carts, and burying them in mass graves out in the woods. Anyway, they discovered the identities of some of these bodies, and one of them they both identified and found a file on. It was a man who was a stamp collector. He was arrested because someone found out this stamp collector had stamps from other countries. In 1937, that meant he was a spy. He was arrested, questioned, and it was something like an hour later he was dead. (The book is linked to at the end of this post.)
So, Stalin was basically clearing out the ranks of his government. Pushing people onto collective farms, Kulaks were sent to gulags, people were purged left right and center. The most famous doctored pictures of people in Stalin's inner circle disappearing largely happened in this period of time (though he did this photo doctoring throughout his time in office, it seems the ones most people know about were all roughly doctored around this time period.) Not even his closest confidants were safe. (An example of this later.)
To effectively liquidate as many people as possible, the NKVD passed an order called NKVD Order No. 00447: Repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements (Russian: О репрессировании бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов). This set the groundwork for who was going to be rounded up, the tiers of people, and how each tier was to be dealt with. It also established troikas, which were essentially three officials appointed to each region. Investigations of individuals were to be carried out speedily, and then the troikas were going to judge the criminals, equally quickly.
Now, to put this in perspective, there were sometimes hundreds of people being brought before these troikas each day. Sometimes they had only two minutes to decide if someone was guilty or not. I've read some wild statistics of this time period saying if ten people were brought before a troika, eight or nine of them would be found guilty. (Again, all sources linked to at the end of this post.)
The order instructed officials to classify kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements into two categories.
Category I: Individuals subject to death by shooting
Category II: Individuals to be sent to the gulag for terms of correctional labor.
It also set quotas per territory, basically meaning (insert territory here) is supposed to deal with a specific number of people in each of the following social classes: proletariat, peasant, kulak, and bourgeois as well as others.
Above is an encrypted telegram to Moscow, which were fairly common during that period. It's someone from a territory asking to raise their assigned quotas (IE: Can I arrest more people?). He's saying they've dealt with X number of criminals, essentially, and they'll have room to deal with X amount more, can you guys let me do this please?
Stalin was smart, and when he got these requests, he made everyone in the top levels of his government sign it, from him and on down the line, so they were all equally culpable, and no one could say, "But I didn't know this was happening!" Thus, he ensured loyalty to his cause, but also made sure there was a record of people who were in on it, and made sure they all equally had skin in the game.
During the Great Terror, it is estimated somewhere around 1.2 million people died.
Which brings us to NKVD Order No. 00485
NKVD Order No. 00485: О ликвидации польских диверсионно-шпионских групп и организаций ПОВ, or, in English: On the elimination of Polish sabotage and espionage groups and POW (military) organizations. This was basically the groundwork for the largest ethnic cleansing campaign during the Terror. While it started with the Polish people, it eventually graduated and ended up targeting Germans, Latvians, Estonians, Finnish, Greek, as well as others.
The order was signed by Nikolai Yezhov, who was the head of the NKVD at the time (and was not long for this world).
(Pictured above: Stalin was infamous for doctoring photos. This famously doctored photo is of him and Yezhov in the first picture, and Yezhov has been disappeared in the second.)
According to Wikipedia:
According to the order, the entire operation was to be completed in three months. Subject to arrest and immediate elimination were persons of the following categories: "prisoners of war from the Polish army who after the 1920 war had remained in the Soviet Union, deserters and political émigrés from Poland (such as Polish communists admitted through prisoners' exchange), former members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and other anti-Soviet political parties; and the inhabitants of Polish districts in border regions." The order was supplemented by a secret letter from Yezhov, specifying the various accusations to be used against the Polish minority, which were fabricated by the Moscow NKVD executive. The order aimed at the arrest of "absolutely all Poles" and confirmed that "the Poles should be completely destroyed". Member of the NKVD Administration for the Moscow District, A. O. Postel (Арон Осипович Постель) explained that although there was no word-for-word quote of "all Poles" in the actual Order, that was exactly how the letter was to be interpreted by the NKVD executioners.
The order impacted mostly strategic centers of the USSR economy, like transportation and communications, railway workers, postal workers, armed forces and security officials. Names were presented to an extrajudicial NKVD body, who then approved them. The people were basically rounded up and shot en masse without a trial. These extrajudicial sentencing bodies were special troikas that were essentially similar to, in theory, the troikas used everywhere else, but different in that they mostly focused on ethnic groups, who largely did not get trials before they were executed.
According to official Soviet state documents, the anti-Polish operation of the NKVD affected 139,815 people, 111,071 of whom were condemned to death without trial and executed immediately afterwards.
The wives and families of those who had been apprehended, were dealt with as follows:
The wives and children of those arrested and executed were dealt with by the NKVD Order No. 00486. The women were sentenced to forced labour for 5 or 10 years. Their minor children were put in orphanages. All possessions were confiscated. Extended families were purposely left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well, affecting up to 200,000–250,000 people of Polish background depending on the size of their families. The NKVD national operations were conducted on a quota system using album procedure. The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries", compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian.
This operation was the largest in the Great Terror, second only to the liquidation of the Kulaks. According to author Timothy Snyder (whose books you really should read), Poles made up about 0.5 percent of the population, and yet constituted 12.5% of those executed. Several historians have considered Stalin's handling of ethnic groups such as Poles during that time as genocidal.
The End
Unfortunately, Stalin kept up the practice of mass deportations, arrests, and executions throughout his time in office. In 1938, however, Yezhov was arrested and tried, and another Georgian and confidant of Stalin's was put in office. A truly repugnant boil on the underbelly of humanity, named Lavrentiy Beria. (Seriously, google this guy.)
In some ways, it was pressures from World War II which changed the course of this operation. Hitler was eyeing the USSR. Troops were moving, and Stalin had just liquidated 25% of his military. There was probably a very real, "Oh shit" moment involved here.
In other ways, it was the arrest of Yezhov and changing of the guard, as it were, that changed the dynamic.
Also, it should be known that the mass executions, deportations, and the upset of humanity on a fundamental and vast scale had impacted the economy so much, they just couldn't continue doing it like this without the economy collapsing.
That being said, Stalin never really did stop. The gulag system was flexed and used well in his day, and there is still information being discovered and uncovered about his numerous tragic purges.
Further reading
How Photos became a Weapon in Stalin's Great Purge
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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