NKVD troika
From Wikinfo
The Russian word troika, "threesome", was used during the Great Purge period in the Soviet Union. Troikas supplemented the previous legal system with a means for quick judgments of dissidents or people accused of "counter-revolutionary" crimes.
According to the NKVD order # 00447 by July 30, 1937 undersigned by Nikolai Yezhov, troikas were created on the levels of republic, krai, and oblast. Investigation was to be performed by operative groups "in a speedy and simplified way", the results were to be delivered to troikas for trials.
The chairman of a troika was the chief of the corresponding territorial subdivision of NKVD (People's Commissar of a republican NKVD, etc.). Usually a troika included the prosecutor of the republic/krai/oblast in question; if not, he was allowed to be present at the session of a troika. The third person was usually the Communist Party secretary of the corresponding regional level.
Protocols of a troika session were passed to the corresponding operative group for executions of sentences. Times and places of executions of death sentences were ordered to be held in secret.
The same order instructed to classify kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements into two categories: the first category of repressed was subject to death by shooting, the second category was subject to labor camps. The order set upper quotas per territory and category. For example Byelorussian SSR was estimated to have 2,000 (1st cat.) + 10,000 (2nd cat.) = 12,000 anti-Soviet elements. It was specifically stressed that quotas were estimates and could not be exceeded without personal approval of Yezhov. But in practice this approval was easy to obtain, and eventually these initial quotas were exceeded by orders of magnitude.
External links
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "NKVD_troika" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_troika, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
