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[1] [2] 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 ...
Stalin was unimpressed by most of the local party leaders, chosen by the former Georgian party boss, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, but writing to Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin commented that "Beria makes a good impression. He is a good organizer, an efficient, capable functionary."
The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions of political prisoners carried out by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, primarily in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and Bessarabia.
The NKVD nearly annihilated Trotsky's family before killing him in Mexico; the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader was part of an assassination task force put together by Special Agent Pavel Sudoplatov, under the personal orders of Stalin. [29] Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov with Stalin (and his daughter Svetlana) in 1934
Earlier in 1938, Yezhov had even ordered the arrest of Beria, who was party chief in Georgia. However, Georgian NKVD chief Sergei Goglidze warned Beria, who immediately flew to Moscow to see Stalin personally. Beria convinced Stalin to spare his life and reminded Stalin how efficiently he had carried out party orders in Georgia and Transcaucasia.
The top secret NKVD Order No. 00485, titled "On the liquidation of the Polish diversionist and espionage groups and POW units," was approved on August 9, 1937 by the Party's Central Committee Politburo, and was signed by Nikolai Yezhov on August 11, 1937. [7]
The State Political Directorate (Russian: Государственное политическое управление, romanized: Gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye), abbreviated as GPU (Russian: ГПУ), was the secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from February 1922 to November 1923.
The decree further noted that NKVD was both sloppy and the same time overzealous and put the blame on the "enemies of the people" who infiltrated NKVD. The decree formally banned Mass operations of the NKVD and ordered the strict accordance to the codes of criminal procedure and the supervision of the NKVD investigations by prosecutors.