You can helpexpand this article with text translated fromthe corresponding article in Russian. (June 2025)Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the Russian article.
Machine translation, likeDeepL orGoogle Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consideradding a topic to this template: there are already 1,126 articles in themain category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
Youmust providecopyright attribution in theedit summary accompanying your translation by providing aninterlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary isContent in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Национальные операции НКВД]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template{{Translated|ru|Национальные операции НКВД}} to thetalk page.
Mass operations of the People's Comissariate of Internal Affairs (NKVD)[1] were carried out during theGreat Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of thePeople's Commissar of Internal AffairsNikolai Yezhov.
A total of 340,000 to 350,000 people were sentenced, of whom 140,000 were targeted in the Polish operation and about 55,000 in the German one.[2] 247,157 were executed, a larger percentage than overall for the Great Purge.[3]
The operations of this type in this period targeted "foreign"ethnicities (ethnicities with cross-border ties to foreignnation-states), unlikenationally targeted repressions duringWorld War II. According to historianOleg Khlevniuk, Stalin became concerned about rearguard uprisings that were seen in theSpanish 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.[4]
Minutes of the January 31, 1938 Politburo meeting list the following ethnicities against which NKVD 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.[5]
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.[6]
^Savin, Andrey. "Ethnification of Stalinism? Ethnic Cleansings and the NKVD Order No 00447 in a Comparative Perspective". In Andrej Kotljarchuk & Olle Sundström (ed.).Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union: New Dimensions of Research. p. 48.
