I have found it necessary and appropriate to upload this stunning article from sciencespo.fr concerning the Soviet NKVD's 1937-38 'Great Terror' mechanism which was imposed by Joseph Stalin himself.

"Soviet xenophobia" (Martin, 2001: 342) was an ideological rather than an ethnic concept. A good illustration of this is provided by one specific National Operation, initiated by NKVD Order n° 00593 on September 20, 1937, which targeted the so-called "Kharbintsy". These were former personnel (engineers, employees, railway workers) of the Chinese-Manchurian railway whose headquarters were based in Kharbin, in Manchuria. After the sale, by the Soviet government, of this railway to Japan in 1935, many returned to the Soviet Union. For Stalin and his team, although most of the Kharbintsy were ethnic Russians, their cross-border ties to the Kharbintsy remaining in China turned them into the functional equivalent of a diaspora nationality. And so, despite their "Russianness", they too became an "enemy group" targeted as part of the National Operations during the Great Terror (Martin, 2001: 343). The National Operations were not a minor part of the Great Terror. According to centralized NKVD statistics, from July 1937 to November 1938, 335,513 persons were sentenced by extrajudicial organs in the course of the implementation of the National Operations (while over 800,000 persons were convicted in the so-called Kulak Operation carried out under Order n° 00447). Among them, 247,157 (or 73.6%) were shot – a proportion considerably higher than in the Kulak Operation, in the process of which 49.3% were sentenced "in the first category" (death sentence) (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999). ++++ 2. DECISION-MAKERS, ORGANIZERS AND ACTORS Although Nikolai Ezhov signed all the secret NKVD Operational Orders related to the National Operations, its instigator was Stalin himself. Five days before the issuing of Order n° 00439 (which launched the German Operation), Stalin scribbled, during the Politburo meeting of July 20, 1937, a short note: "ALL Germans working on our military, semimilitary and chemical factories, on electric stations and building sites, in ALL regions are ALL to be arrested" (Okhotin & Roginskii, 1999). As his correspondence with Ezhov clearly shows, Stalin closely monitored the implementation of the National Operations. On Ezhov’s first report on the progress of the Polish Operation (23,000 arrests in four weeks) Stalin wrote: "Cam. Ezhov. This is excellent! Continue to dig, cleanse, eradicate all this polish dirt ! Liquidate all this dirt in the name of the interests of the USSR. J.Stalin, 14.X.37". . Thus, the Sverdlovsk region could boast an excellent score – 4,379 individuals arrested in operations implementing Order n° 00439, or 8% of the overall figure of the German Operation (but out of these 4,379, only 122 were of German origin!). As the fate of the arrested depended entirely on the zeal of local NKVD bosses, the chance of being caught and the probability of being sentenced "in the first category" (death penalty) varied considerably: in Armenia, 31% of those trapped in National Operations were shot; in the Vologda region, 46%; in Bielorussia, 88%; Krasnodar territory, Novossibirsk and Orenbourg regions had the highest rate of "first category" victims: respectively 94%, 94.8% and 96.4%! The cases of people arrested under one of these National Operations was swiftly examined by the regional dvoïka (a two-man commission comprising the NKVD chief and the procurator), who decided what punishment should be applied to the accused: the first category (death sentence) or the second category (10 years in camp). The verdict was to be confirmed by Moscow, that is by Ezhov or Vychinski (the General Procurator of the USSR). Each case examined by the local dvoïka was summed up in a few lines giving a minimal information on the identity of the accused, their alleged crime, and the proposed punishment. ++++ 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY A - Books ARTIZOV, Andrei, SIGACHEV, Iouri, et al. (eds.), 2000, Reabilitatsia: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS, mart 1953-fevral’ 1956 (Rehabilitation: as it happened. Documents of the Praesidium of the CC of the CPSU, March 1953 – February 1956), Moscow: Mejdunarodnyi Fond Demokratia. ARTIZOV, Andrei, SIGATCHEV, Iouri, et al. (eds.), 2003, Reabilitatsia: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS, fevral’ 1956- nacalo 1980-x godov (Rehabilitation: as it happened. Documents of the Praesidium of the CC of the CPSU, February1956 – beginning of the 1980’s), Moscow: Mejdunarodnyi Fond Demokratia. BELKOVETS, Lidia, 1995, Bolshoi Terror i sud’by nemetskoi derevni v Sibiri (The Great Terror and the Fate of German Settlements in Siberia), Moscow: Zvenia. BRZEZINSKI, Zbigniew, 1958, The Permanent Purge, Cambridge (Mass): Cambridge University Press. CONQUEST, Robert, 1968, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, New York: MacMillan DANILOV, Viktor Petrovitch, MANNING, Roberta, VIOLA, Lynne (eds.), 2001, Tragedia sovetskoi derevni. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomax, 1927-1939 (The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside: Documents in 5 volumes, 1927-1939), vol.3, Moscow: ROSSPEN. DANILOV, Viktor Petrovitch, MANNING, Roberta, VIOLA, Lynne (eds.), 2006, Tragedia sovetskoi derevni. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomax, 1927-1939 (The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside: Documents in 5 volumes, 1927-1939), vol.5, 1/2, Moscow: ROSSPEN. GERMAN, Andrei, 1996, Istoria Respubliki Nemtsev Povoljia (History of the Volga German Republic), Moscow: Zvenia. GETTY, John Arch, 1985, Origins of the Great Purges: the Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. GOLOVKOVA, Lidia (ed.), 1997-2004, Butovskii Poligon. 1937-1938: Kniga pamiati jertv politiceskix repressij (Butovo’s Shooting Range, 1937-1938: Book of memory of the victims of political repression), vol.1-8, Moscow: Alzo. JANSEN, Marc and PETROV, Nikita, 2002, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. KHANEVITCH, Viktor, 1998, Iz istorii zemli tomskoi: 1937 Sibirskii Belostok (From the History of Tomsk Region: The Siberian Belostok), Tomsk: Zvenia. KUROMIYA, Hiroaki, 2007, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930’s, New Haven, London: Yale University Press. MCLOUGHLIN, Barry and MCDERMOTT, kevin (eds.), 2003, Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. MARTIN, Terry, 2001, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. VATLIN, Aleksandr, 2004, Terror rajonnogo maschtaba: ‘massovye operatsii’ NKVD v Kuntsevskom rajone Moskovskoj oblasti 1937-1938 (The Terror on a District Level: ‘mass operations’ of the NKVD in the district of Kuntsevo of the Moscow region in 1937-1938), Moscow: ROSSPEN. WERTH, Nicolas, 2007, La terreur et le désarroi. Staline et son système, Paris: Perrin. WERTH, Nicolas, 2009, L’ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs. Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse, 1937-1938, Paris: Tallandier. B - Articles HAGENLOH, Paul, «Socially Harmful Elements and the Great Terror», in FITZPATRICK, Sheila (ed.), 2000, Stalinism: New Directions , London & New York: Routledge, pp. 286-307. KHLEVNIUK, Oleg, «The Reasons for the Great Terror: the Foreign-Political Aspect», in PONS, Silvio, and ROMANO, Andrea (eds.), 2000, Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914-1945 , Roma: Annali, pp. 159-173. MARTIN, Terry, 1998, «The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing», Journal of Modern History , 70: 4, pp. 813-861. OKHOTIN, Nikita, and ROGINSKII, Arsenii, «Iz istorii ‘nemetskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937-1938» (History of the ‘German Operation’ of the NKVD, 1937-1938), in SCHERBAKOVA, Irina (ed.), 1999, Nakazannyi Narod (The Punished People), Moscow: Zvenia, pp. 35-74. PETROV, Nikita, and ROGINSKII, Arsenii, «The ‘Polish Operation’ of the NKVD, 1937-1938», in MCLOUGHLIN, Barry, MCDERMOTT, Kevin (eds.), 2003, Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153-172. SHEARER, David, «Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD During the 1930’s», in MCLOUGHLIN, Barry, and MCDERMOTT, Kevin (eds.), 2003, Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 85-117. WERTH, Nicolas, «The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, 1937-1938», in GELLATELY, Robert, and KIERNAN, Ben (eds.), 2003, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective , Cambridge (Mass): Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-241. WERTH, Nicolas, 2006, «Les ‘opérations de masse’ de la ‘Grande Terreur’ en URSS, 1937-1938», Bulletin de l’IHTP , 86: 6-167. C - Website Website of the Memorial Society: https://www.memo.ru/en-us/ Cite this item Werth Nicolas, The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938), Mass Violence & Résistance, [online], published on: 20 May, 2010, accessed 17/05/2021, http://bo-k2s.sciences-po.fr/.../nkvd-mass-secret..., ISSN 1961-9898 ​