NKVD
The NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, ran the Soviet Union's secret police machinery from 1934 to 1946. In those twelve years, it arrested at least 1.3 million people in 1937 and 1938 alone. It executed more than 680,000 of them. It sent millions to forced labor camps. It had spies inside the Manhattan Project. It killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. And when it was finally dissolved in 1946, it simply became something else. The questions that follow are not small ones: How did an agency formed to handle police work and firefighting become the instrument of one of history's most systematic programs of state violence? Who ran it, and how did they get that power? And what exactly was it doing when no one was supposed to be watching?
After the Russian October Revolution of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks faced an immediate problem. The Provisional Government's police had been dissolved, and the Workers' and Peasants' Militias that replaced them were, in the words of those who built the new state, largely inexperienced and unqualified. The Council of People's Commissars recognized they had no capable security force. Their answer was the Cheka, a secret political police led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, which gained the right to carry out quick non-judicial trials and executions whenever that was deemed necessary to protect the revolution.
The Cheka was reorganized in 1922 as the GPU, which then became the OGPU under the broader Soviet structure. When 1934 arrived, the NKVD of the Russian republic was transformed into an all-union agency covering the entire Soviet state, and the OGPU was folded into it as the Main Directorate for State Security. Communist Party leaders took to calling it "the leading detachment of our party." Along with secret police powers, the NKVD absorbed control of all detention facilities, the Gulag forced labor camps, regular police, border guards, firefighting services, highways, and railways. Its reach was administrative as much as it was coercive.
The NKVD's leadership reflected the ethnic composition of the early Soviet elite. In 1934, Jewish officers made up 38.5 percent of the leadership cadre, running seven of the ten main departments. Russians made up 31.3 percent, followed by smaller shares of Latvians, Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Belarusians, and Germans. By 1937, twelve of twenty main directorates were headed by Jewish officers. After Nikolai Yezhov's removal in 1938, that proportion collapsed to 3.9 percent by 1939.
Nikolai Yezhov took over the NKVD in 1936, and the Gulag population nearly tripled in just two years under his leadership. In 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million people were arrested, and 681,692 were executed for what the state called crimes against the state. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 during this period, with at least 140,000 of those prisoners dying of malnutrition, exhaustion, and exposure.
Formal conviction was handled by NKVD troikas, special three-person courts martial operating with very low evidentiary standards. A tip from an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. The state sanctioned the use of what it called "physical means of persuasion," a bureaucratic phrase for torture, opening the door to abuses later documented in the recollections of survivors and NKVD members alike. Hundreds of mass graves were subsequently found across the country.
The purges moved in organized waves directed by Politburo decisions. They swept through engineers in the Shakhty Trial, through military and party elites under Order 00447, and through medical professionals in the Doctors' Plot. Gas vans were used during the Great Purge in Moscow, Ivanovo, and Omsk. The NKVD's Operation No. 00486 automatically repressed the families of those arrested, including children. The Polish Operation of 1937-1938 resulted in the execution of 111,091 Poles alone. Foreigners living in the Soviet Union were targeted with particular attention: American workers at the Soviet Ford GAZ plant, suspected of Western influence, were taken to Lubyanka Prison in the very Ford Model A cars they had helped assemble, and nearly all were executed or died in labor camps. Many of those killed were buried at Yuzhnoye Butovo District, near Moscow.
Pavel Sudoplatov and Iskhak Akhmerov led espionage networks that the NKVD established in nearly every major Western country during the 1930s, including the United States. The agency recruited agents across social strata: from unemployed intellectuals such as Mark Zborowski to aristocrats such as Martha Dodd. These networks gathered intelligence and also organized what internal documents called "wet business," where enemies of the USSR either disappeared or were killed in the open.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin's most bitter international critic, was killed in Mexico City in 1940. Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian nationalist leader working to build a separatist movement, was assassinated in Rotterdam. Yevgeny Miller, a former Tsarist general who was funding anti-communist movements inside the USSR with European government backing, was kidnapped in Paris, brought to Moscow, interrogated, and executed. Noe Ramishvili, who had been Prime Minister of independent Georgia before the Bolshevik takeover and was coordinating Georgian nationalist organizations and the August uprising from France, was also assassinated in Paris.
Beyond confirmed kills, prominent dissidents including Walter Krivitsky, Lev Sedov, Ignace Reiss, and Willi Munzenberg died under circumstances that were, at minimum, highly suspicious. During the Spanish Civil War, the NKVD ran Section X, coordinating Soviet intervention on behalf of the Republicans, while operating secret prisons around Madrid used to torture and kill enemies, beginning with Spanish Nationalists and Catholics and shifting after 1938 toward anarchists and Trotskyists. In 1937, Andres Nin, the secretary of the Trotskyist POUM, was tortured and killed in an NKVD prison in Alcala de Henares.
In March 1940, representatives of the NKVD and the German Gestapo met for a week in Zakopane to coordinate the pacification of Poland. The meeting happened before the German invasion of the Soviet Union turned the two powers into enemies. Once the invasion began in June 1941, the relationship shifted entirely, and the NKVD mobilized on a massive scale.
At the start of the war, the NKVD formed 15 rifle divisions; by 1945 this had grown to 53 divisions and 28 brigades. These units served in rear-area security, enforcing Stalin's Order No. 270 and Order No. 227, which used brutality and coercion to prevent retreat and raise what the state called troop morale. The 10th NKVD Rifle Division fought at the Battle of Stalingrad. After the fall of Kiev, NKVD agents set fire to Nazi headquarters and other targets, burning down much of the city center.
The NKVD also executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners in 1940-1941. The Katyn massacre, where chief NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin personally oversaw and carried out thousands of executions, killed approximately 22,000 Polish POWs. On the 26th of November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued a declaration acknowledging Stalin's direct responsibility for Katyn, stating that archival material "not only unveils the scale of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders."
The NKVD ran a parallel prison system for scientists and engineers arrested on political charges, housed in facilities far more comfortable than the standard Gulag camps. These were known colloquially as sharashkas. Among those held there was Sergey Korolev, who later became head designer of the Soviet rocket program and oversaw the first human space flight mission in 1961. Andrei Tupolev, the airplane designer, was also a sharashka prisoner. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served time in one and based his novel The First Circle on his experience there.
The broader Gulag system contributed directly to Soviet economic development. Colonization of Siberia, the Far North, and the Far East were among the explicitly stated goals in the first laws governing Soviet labor camps. The NKVD operated its own production plans covering mining, road and railway construction, canals, dams, factories, and logging. After World War II, the NKVD also coordinated work on Soviet nuclear weapons under General Pavel Sudoplatov, using intelligence the agency had obtained from the United States during the Manhattan Project. The scientists on this project were not prisoners, but the NKVD supervised the entire effort because of what the state described as its great importance and the corresponding requirement for absolute security.
In parallel, the NKVD's foreign intelligence arm recruited important British officials as agents in the 1940s and penetrated both MI6 and MI5. The first President of postwar Poland, Boleslaw Bierut, had been an NKVD agent.
In March 1946, all Soviet commissariats were renamed ministries. The NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, while the secret police functions housed in the NKGB became the Ministry of State Security, the MGB. After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev halted the purges, and the MGB merged briefly back into the MVD before the two functions permanently split in 1954 into the MVD for criminal policing and the KGB for political police, intelligence, and counterintelligence.
From the 1950s onward, thousands of victims were legally rehabilitated, meaning their convictions were formally reversed and their rights restored. But the process was incomplete. Most rehabilitations came with the wording "due to lack of evidence of the case of crime" rather than a full clearing of all charges. Many victims and their relatives refused to apply at all, out of fear or because they no longer had the necessary documents. Very few NKVD agents were ever formally convicted of specific rights violations. In the 1990s and 2000s, a small number of former agents in the Baltic states were convicted of crimes against local populations. Andrei Zhukov, researching a Moscow archive, eventually identified just over 40,000 individual NKVD officers involved in the 1930s arrests and killings, compiling the single most complete accounting of the people who carried out the purges.
Common questions
What was the NKVD and when did it operate?
The NKVD, or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. It succeeded the OGPU and held a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. In 1946 it was renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
How many people were executed by the NKVD during the Great Purge?
In 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 were executed for what the Soviet state called crimes against the state. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 during the same period, with at least 140,000 prisoners dying from malnutrition, exhaustion, and exposure.
Who were the heads of the NKVD?
The NKVD was led by Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1945, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946. Each headed the agency during a distinct phase of Soviet internal repression.
Did the NKVD assassinate Leon Trotsky?
Yes. Leon Trotsky, Stalin's most bitter international critic, was killed in Mexico City in 1940 by NKVD operatives. He is among the officially confirmed victims of the NKVD's foreign assassination program.
What was the Katyn massacre and what was the NKVD's role?
The Katyn massacre was the NKVD's execution of approximately 22,000 Polish POWs in 1940-1941. Chief NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin personally oversaw and carried out thousands of the killings. On the 26th of November 2010, the Russian State Duma declared that the massacre was committed on direct orders from Stalin.
What famous scientists were held in NKVD sharashka prisons?
Sergey Korolev, who later became head designer of the Soviet rocket program and oversaw the first human space flight mission in 1961, was held in a sharashka. Aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who based his novel The First Circle on the experience, were also imprisoned in sharashkas.
All sources
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