🔨 Work
Prisoners worked ten to twelve hours a day or more, mostly outdoors with hand tools. Each prisoner had a daily work norm to meet, however cold it was. At Kolyma winter temperatures could fall below minus 40 degrees.
Purges, Show Trials, the Cult of Stalin and the Revision of History » Yezhov, the NKVD and the Gulags
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Edexcel spec: Paper 1, Depth study 5, Key topic 3
- What the NKVD was and the part Yezhov played in the terror of 1937-38
- How arrests, quotas and informers were used to control the people
- What the gulags were for
- What conditions were like for prisoners in the gulags
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Unlock This CourseThe NKVD: Stalin's secret police
Stalin could not control about 170 million people alone. His main tool was the NKVD, set up in July 1934 to replace the older secret police, the OGPU. The NKVD ran the secret police, the ordinary police, the border guards and the labour camps. Its headquarters was the Lubyanka building in Moscow, which also held a prison.
The NKVD's job was to find and remove 'enemies of the people'. It answered to Stalin, not to the courts, so nobody could check what it did.
Key terms:
- NKVD: the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which ran the secret police and the labour camps from 1934.
- Troika: a board of three officials that sentenced prisoners without a proper trial.
- Informer: a person who secretly passed information about others to the secret police.
- Gulag: the Soviet system of forced labour camps. The word is also used for a single camp.
- Yezhovshchina: 'the time of Yezhov', the Russian name for the terror of 1937-38.
Yezhov and the Yezhovshchina
The first head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda. In September 1936 Stalin complained that the secret police were 'four years behind' in uncovering plots. He replaced Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov, a loyal party official.
Yezhov was only about 1.5 metres tall and became known as 'the Bloody Dwarf'. He did exactly what Stalin wanted, and did it fast. He purged the NKVD itself, removing Yagoda's men, and then ran the mass arrests of 1937-38. Stalin signed many of the lists of people to be shot, but it was Yezhov who organised the work. Posters showed Yezhov's spiked glove crushing a snake that stood for the 'enemies'.
By late 1938 the terror was harming the country. Factories, offices and the army had lost too many skilled people. In November 1938 the mass operations were stopped and Yezhov was replaced by Lavrenty Beria. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939 and shot in February 1940. This suited Stalin, because the 'excesses' could now be blamed on Yezhov.
Arrests, quotas and informers
📋 Quotas
In July 1937 Yezhov signed NKVD Order 00447 against 'former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements'. Each region was given a number of people to shoot and a number to send to camps. The Moscow region was told to shoot 5,000 and send 30,000 to camps. In total nearly 76,000 were to be shot and about 193,000 imprisoned. Local NKVD chiefs, afraid of looking soft, asked for their numbers to be raised.
🚨 Arrests
Arrests usually came at night. The NKVD's vans were nicknamed 'black ravens', and many people kept a small bag packed in case one came for them. Prisoners were charged under Article 58 of the criminal code, which covered 'counter-revolutionary crimes'. From 1937 the NKVD was allowed to beat prisoners. Another method was the 'conveyor', when teams of officers questioned a prisoner for days without sleep until he or she signed a confession.
👂 Informers
The NKVD had informers in factories, offices, universities and blocks of flats. A joke about Stalin, told to the wrong person, could be punished as 'anti-Soviet agitation'. Children were taught to admire Pavlik Morozov, a village boy who, in the official story, reported his own father to the authorities and was killed by relatives in 1932. Historians now doubt much of that story, but its message was clear: loyalty to the state came before family.
Most prisoners never saw a courtroom. Their cases went to a troika made up of the local NKVD chief, the local party secretary and the state prosecutor. The prisoner was not present and had no lawyer. A troika could deal with hundreds of cases in one sitting. By the time the operation under Order 00447 ended in November 1938, about 767,000 people had been sentenced and about 387,000 of them had been shot.
The result was fear. People learned not to speak openly, even to friends. This is why the methods worked as control: Stalin did not need to arrest everyone, only to make everyone afraid of arrest.
The gulags: what were they for?
'Gulag' comes from the Russian initials for Main Camp Administration, the office set up in 1930 to run the labour camps. From 1934 it was part of the NKVD. By the start of 1939 its camps and labour colonies held about 1.7 million prisoners. The gulags had three roles.
- Removing 'enemies'. Prisoners were sent thousands of kilometres from home, often for ten years.
- Spreading fear. Everyone knew someone who had vanished into the camps. The threat kept others obedient.
- Forced labour. Prisoners did work that free workers would not do. They mined gold at Kolyma in the far north-east, dug coal at Vorkuta inside the Arctic Circle, felled timber and built canals and railways. Remember, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was finished in 1933: it was dug by prisoners. Kolyma's gold helped pay for foreign machinery.
Conditions in the gulags
🍞 Food
Food was mainly bread and thin soup, and the amount depended on work. Prisoners who missed the norm had their bread cut. This made them weaker, so they missed the norm again.
🏠 Living conditions
Prisoners slept on plank bunks in crowded wooden huts, often heated by a single stove. Clothing and boots were poor. Frostbite, scurvy, typhus and dysentery were common, and medical care was basic.
👥 Other prisoners and guards
'Politicals', sentenced under Article 58, were held with ordinary criminals, who often stole their food and clothes. Guards could shoot anyone who tried to escape. In remote camps there was nowhere to run to in any case.
Many did not survive. In 1938 more than 100,000 prisoners died in the camps and colonies. The worst year came later, in 1942, when food was short because of the war and about one prisoner in four died.
Common mistakes
Don't call the gulags death camps. Their purpose was punishment and forced labour, and many prisoners were released at the end of their sentences. The deaths came from cold, hunger, overwork and disease. Don't write as if Yezhov acted alone: he carried out Stalin's wishes and was then blamed for them. And don't say the NKVD only arrested people who opposed Stalin. Quotas meant that numbers mattered more than guilt.
Exam-style question
(b) Explain two effects of the work of the NKVD under Yezhov (1936-38) on the people of the Soviet Union. [8 marks]
Model answer
One effect was that huge numbers of ordinary people were shot or sent to camps, whether or not they had done anything. NKVD Order 00447, signed by Yezhov in July 1937, gave every region a quota. In total nearly 76,000 people were to be shot and about 193,000 sent to the gulags. Because local NKVD chiefs were afraid of looking soft, they filled their quotas and asked for more, and troikas sentenced prisoners without a trial. This led to about 767,000 people being sentenced by November 1938, so the NKVD's methods turned a hunt for enemies into mass killing.
A second effect was a climate of fear and mistrust in daily life. The NKVD used informers in factories, offices and blocks of flats, and a joke about Stalin could be punished under Article 58 as 'anti-Soviet agitation'. Arrests came at night, so many people kept a bag packed in case a 'black raven' van came for them. As a result, people stopped speaking openly, even to friends. This meant that open criticism of Stalin almost disappeared, which made his control of the people stronger.
What lifts this to the top level: it gives two separate effects, backs each with precise facts (the order, the figures, Article 58) and uses linking phrases such as 'this led to' and 'as a result' to show how the NKVD's work produced each effect.
Exam tip
One effect alone cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks, however well you explain it. Don't spend your time describing how the NKVD worked. Start each paragraph with 'One effect was...' or 'A second effect was...', give a precise fact such as Order 00447, then finish with a sentence that says what changed for the Soviet people.