Mass operations of the People's Comissariate of Internal Affairs (NKVD)[1] were carried out during the
Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of the
People's Commissar of Internal Affairs
Nikolai Yezhov.
National operations of the NKVD
The operations of this type in this period targeted "foreign" ethnicities (ethnicities with cross-border ties to foreign
nation-states), unlike
nationally targeted repressions during
World War II. According to historian
Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin became concerned about rearguard uprisings that were seen in the
Spanish Civil War and believed that "nationalities of foreign governments" posed a threat in border regions, even if they were Soviet citizens whose ancestors had sometimes lived decades or centuries in the areas controlled by the Soviet Union.[2]
Minutes of the January 31, 1938 Politburo meeting list the following ethnicities against which NKND operations were to be continued: Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians,
Harbinites, Chinese, and Romanians. It was also suggested to carry out similar NKVD operations against Bulgarians and Macedonians. [3]
From August 1937 to October 1938, 353,513 people were arrested and 247,157 were shot in the national operations of NKVD. It is estimated that this would make up 34% of the total victims of the Great Purge.[4]