NKVD

NKVD (Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) has origins which go back to the beginnings of Soviet power. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Vecheka) was founded on 20 December 1917. The Vecheka was disbanded on 8 February 1922 and its functions transferred to the State Political Administration (GPU), although the term ‘Chekist’ to describe its agents, officials, and functionaries has persisted to the present day. When, the USSR was founded in 1923 the GPU became the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) and was attached to the Council of People's Commissars. In July 1934, the OGPU was transformed into the GUGB (Main Administration of State Security) and integrated into a newly formed NKVD. During this whole period the powers and competence of the security services increased, so that they became, together with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the basis on which Soviet power rested and also the basis of Stalin's power. In 1938 L. P. Beria became head of the NKVD and remained its head and that of its successor organizations until after the death of Stalin in 1953.

In February 1941 the state security organs and the intelligence section, the former OGPU, were separated from the NKVD and a separate People's Commissariat of State Security (Narodny Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or NKGB) was formed. But in July 1941, following the German invasion of the USSR (see BARBAROSSA), this decision was reversed. However, in April 1943 the original, pre-war plan was put into operation and the NKVD and NKGB were again split, with the state security organs going to the NKGB. Although internal affairs and state security were now the responsibility of separate commissariats, Beria, who in January 1942 had received the rank of general commissar of state security, equivalent to that of Marshal of the Soviet Union, remained in charge of the security apparatus. One of his lieutenants, V. N. Merkulov, became head of the NKGB. In March 1946 the commissariats became ministries and the NKVD and NKGB became MVD and MGB respectively. Throughout this period Soviet citizens always referred to the security services as NKVD rather than NKGB.

To carry out its functions the NKVD had at its disposal a vast apparatus of agents, internal counter-insurgency and border troops, and units responsible for communications. A Soviet estimate puts the number of NKVD troops during the war at 53 divisions and 28 brigades, not counting border troops, and these played a leading role in partisan warfare (see USSR, 8).

In 1921 border troops numbered 95,000 men. In 1934 they were placed under the authority of the NKVD. On the eve of the German attack they numbered 157–158,000 men, and of these 100,000 were positioned along the western borders of the USSR. Armed only with light weapons, they were exposed to the German onslaught (see Brest-Litovsk, for example) and suffered heavy losses. The survivors were formed into fifteen infantry divisions and took part in fighting on many fronts, including the battles of Moscow, Smolensk, Stalingrad, and Kursk. During the course of the war 113,700 border troops were engaged in fighting. Three days after the outbreak of the German–Soviet war, on 25 June 1941, they were given the task of securing the rear of the Red Army. As such their tasks were numerous: uncovering enemy agents, liquidating small detachments of enemy troops, protecting communications, and arresting deserters. When the Red Army took the offensive they were charged with mopping-up operations, restoring order and suppressing dissident nationalist forces—in fact with restoring Soviet authority. Their operations did not terminate at the borders of the USSR. They continued their functions with the Red Army in eastern Europe and Germany. Equally important was their activity against Japanese forces when the Soviets went to war against Japan on 7 August 1945 (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns). Because of their knowledge of the terrain the border troops mounted the initial attacks. These were successful and enabled the Red Army to move rapidly against the Japanese Kwantung Army.

The pre-war terror unleashed by the NKVD was neither the first nor the last exercise of mass persecution, mass imprisonment, and mass murder. Even the purge of the officer corps of the armed forces did not cease after BARBAROSSA, but only in November 1941. Under the aegis of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Soviets annexed eastern Poland in September 1939, the three Baltic States and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in June 1940. The elections which followed these annexations and which provided the appearance of overwhelming support for Soviet rule were one way in which the NKVD carried out its task of integrating these territories into the USSR. Another was the liquidation of all those who might be considered a danger to Soviet power. Thus, some one and a half million Poles were transported from their homes, nearly half of whom died. It is estimated that 4% of the population of Estonia and 2% of Latvians and Lithuanians were transported to corrective labour camps, the GUlags, administered by a NKVD department. The officer corps of those Polish soldiers taken prisoners by the Soviets was massacred, some 15,000 of them shot. In 1943 the Germans discovered the bodies of 4,000 of them in mass graves in the forest of Katyń, near Smolensk. After BARBAROSSA a similar fate awaited some of the Soviet nationalities. By a decree of 28 August 1941 the Volga Germans living in their own autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic were transported from their homes. The grounds given for this population transfer was that there were among the Germans ‘thousands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies’ whom the others had chosen not to report to the Soviet authorities. A similar fate awaited the Crimean Tatars and six other smaller nationalities. The number involved certainly exceeded a million (see deportations).

NKVD and NKGB activity did not spare the other nationalities of the USSR. At the end of the war there were in Germany about two million Soviet citizens who had been taken there as forced labour. In addition there were over a million prisoners-of-war, the miserable remnant of the millions the Germans had murdered or starved to death. Willingly or unwillingly all these Soviet citizens, or citizens of areas recently annexed by the USSR, were handed over to Soviet authorities and the majority of them were sent to the GUlag.

The establishment of a foreign intelligence and information department of the Vecheka did not come until December 1920, when a foreign department, (Innostranyi Otdel, or INO) was founded. The gradual establishment of Soviet diplomatic and trading agencies gave the INO the opportunity to gain a foothold abroad, directing its main activity at White Russians in exile, and subsequently the Trotskyists. It can thus be seen as an extension of the NKVD's police activities within the USSR. From 1938 to 1940 it was headed by V. G. Dekanozov, who for part of this time was also deputy foreign commissar and subsequently ambassador to Berlin. His successor until 1946 was P. M. Fitin and it was under him that the INO was raised in status becoming the foreign directorate (Inostrannoye Upravlenie, or INU).

In its intelligence work abroad the NKVD was also closely associated with military intelligence, the Fourth Department of the General Staff, later the GRU, whose work the NKVD, being the more powerful organization, supervised. It is probable that intelligence activity in Germany and German-occupied Europe, as also in Japan (see Sorge), was the responsibility of the GRU, while it was the NKVD/NKGB which controlled the network in the USA. Perhaps its most spectacular success was in the UK where, through the agency of ‘Kim’ Philby (see MI6) and other British traitors, it penetrated influential sections of government. It was equally successful in recruiting as agents men involved in research to produce the atomic bomb. During the war the NKVD/NKGB also had contacts with both SOE and the Office of Strategic Services.

H. Hanak

Bibliography

Andrew, C., and and Gordievsky, O. , KGB. The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, 1990).
Knight, A. W. , The KGB. Police and Politics in the Soviet Union (rev. edn., Boston, 1990).