Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD during the 1930s

Abstract

This chapter examines the character of mass repression during the 1930s by focusing on the evolving policies of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del). The NKVD included both the regular police (militsiia) and the organs of state security, the GUGB (Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti). The predecessor to the GUGB was the Unified State Political Administration, the OGPU (Ob’edinennoe gosudarstvennoepolitkheskoe upravlenie). Although administratively linked throughout the 1930s, the police and the OGPU/GUGB were supposed to have different functions. The regular police were charged to fight crime and to maintain social order. The OGPU/GUGB was charged to protect the Soviet state and its leaders from the country’s political enemies. In fact, as I will show, early in the 1930s these two functions merged in the policies of the police and the OGPU. Solving problems of mass social disorder became synonymous with the political protection of the state and defined a major priority for political leaders and high officials of the OGPU/NKVD. That priority was reflected in the primacy given to operational policies of “social cleansing” and mass social reorganisation. Throughout the middle 1930s especially, wide-scale police operations targeted criminals and other marginal social groups.