USSR and repression

NKVD

People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs

The Soviet interior ministry of 1934–1946, combining the political police, regular police, internal and border troops and the Gulag camps. It carried out the Great Terror, the Katyn massacre and mass deportations.

The all-Union NKVD was set up in July 1934 and absorbed the OGPU political police. It was headed in turn by Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria. In 1937–1938 the NKVD carried out the Great Terror, including the Polish Operation, in which more than a hundred thousand people were murdered. Some state security tasks passed at times, and from 1943 permanently, to a separate commissariat, the NKGB. In 1946 the NKVD was renamed the MVD.

For Poles the NKVD means above all 1939–1941 and 1944–1945: arrests in the occupied eastern lands, the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people deep into the USSR, and the murder of some 22,000 prisoners of war and other prisoners in the Katyn massacre in spring 1940. After the Red Army arrived in 1944, the NKVD disarmed Home Army units, set up camps for its soldiers and in March 1945 treacherously arrested the leaders of the Underground State.