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Soviet Union [USSR] Soviet Predecessor Organizations, 1917-54
The Bolshevik regime created a police system that proved to be
far more effective than the tsarist version. It swept away the
tsarist police, so despised by Russians of all political
persuasions, along with other tsarist institutions, and replaced it
with a political police of considerably greater dimensions, both in
the scope of its authority and in the severity of its methods.
However lofty their initial goals were, the Bolsheviks forcibly
imposed their rule on the people. They constituted a dictatorship
of a minority that had to establish a powerful political police
apparatus to preserve its domination.
The first Soviet political police, created in December 1917,
was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating
Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia
komissiia po bor'be s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem--VChK; also
known as the Vecheka or the Cheka). The Vecheka was very much an ad
hoc organization, whose powers gradually grew in response to
various emergencies and threats to Soviet rule (see
table 56, Appendix A). No formal legislation establishing the Vecheka was
ever enacted. It was to serve as an organ of preliminary
investigation, but the crimes it was to uncover were not defined,
and the procedures for handling cases were not set forth. This
situation was the result of the extralegal character of the
Vecheka, which was conceived not as a permanent state institution
but as a temporary organ for waging war against "class enemies."
Given its militant role and supralegal status, it is not surprising
that the Vecheka, which was headed by Feliks E. Dzerzhinskii,
acquired powers of summary justice as the threat of
counterrevolution and foreign intervention grew. After an attempt
was made on Lenin's life in August 1918, the Vecheka unleashed its
violence on a wide scale--the so-called Red Terror--which continued
until 1920 and caused thousands to lose their lives.
The end of the Civil War (1918-21), the demobilization of the
Red Army, and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in
1921 brought about a changed atmosphere that seemed incompatible
with a terrorist political police. Lenin himself spoke of the need
for a reform of the political police, and in early 1922 the Vecheka
was abolished and its functions transferred to the State Political
Directorate (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie--GPU). When
the Soviet Union was formed in December 1922, the GPU was raised to
the level of a federal agency, designated the Unified State
Political Directorate (Ob''edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe
upravlenie--OGPU), and attached to the Council of People's
Commissars. On paper it appeared that the powers of the political
police had been reduced significantly. Indeed, police operations
during the NEP period were considerably less violent, and the staff
and budget of the political police were reduced. Initially, the
OGPU was subject to definite procedural requirements regarding
arrests and was not given the powers of summary justice that its
predecessor had. But the legal constraints on the OGPU were
gradually removed, and its authority grew throughout the 1920s. The
OGPU was drawn into the intraparty struggles that ensued between
Stalin and his opponents and was also enlisted in the drive to
collectivize the peasantry by force, beginning in late 1929, an
operation that resulted in the death of upwards of 5 million
people.
In July 1934, the OGPU was transformed into the Main
Directorate for State Security (Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi
bezopasnosti--GUGB) and integrated into the People's Commissariat
of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennykh del--NKVD),
which had been given
all-union (see Glossary) status earlier that
year. The functions of the security police and those of the
internal affairs apparatus, which controlled the regular police and
the militia, were thus united in one agency. The NKVD was a
powerful organization. In addition to controlling the security
police and the regular police, it was in charge of border and
internal troops, fire brigades, convoy troops, and, after 1934, the
entire penal system, including regular prisons and forced labor
camps, or the
Gulag (see Glossary). During the period from 1934 to
1940, the NKVD took charge of numerous economic
enterprises (see Glossary) that employed forced labor,
such as gold mining, major
construction projects, and other industrial activity. In addition,
the Special Board, attached to the NKVD, operated outside the legal
codes and was empowered to impose on persons deemed "socially
dangerous" sentences of exile, deportation, or confinement in labor
camps. The Special Board soon became one of the chief instruments
of Stalin's purges.
Stalin's domination over the party was not absolute at this
time, however. Dissatisfaction with his policies continued to be
manifested by some party members, and elements existed within the
leadership that might have opposed any attempt to use police terror
against the party. Among Stalin's potential challengers was Sergei
Kirov, chief of the Leningrad party apparatus. Conveniently for
Stalin, Kirov was assassinated by a disgruntled ex-party member in
December 1934. This provided Stalin with the pretext for launching
an assault against the party. Although Stalin proceeded cautiously,
the turning point had been reached, and the terror machinery was in
place. From 1936 to 1938, the NKVD arrested and executed millions
of party members, government officials, and ordinary citizens. The
military also came under assault. Much of the officer corps was
wiped out in 1937-38, leaving the country ill prepared for World
War II. The era in which the NKVD, with Stalin's aproval,
terrorized Soviet citizens became known in the West as the
Great Terror (see Glossary).
The war years brought further opportunities for the political
police, under the control of Lavrenty Beria, to expand its
authority. The NKVD assumed a number of additional economic
functions that made use of the expanding labor camp population. The
NKVD also broadened its presence in the Red Army, where it
conducted extensive surveillance of the troops. Toward the end of
the war, the political police moved into areas formerly under
German occupation to arrest those suspected of sympathy for the
Nazis. They also suppressed nationalist movements in the Estonian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, and western Ukrainian republics.
Beria himself steadily gained power and authority during this
period. In early 1946, when he was made a full member of the
Politburo and a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (the
new name for the Council of People's Commissars), he relinquished
his NKVD post, but he apparently retained some control over the
police through his protégés in that organization. In March 1953,
following Stalin's death, Beria became chief of the MVD, which
amalgamated the regular police and the security police into one
organization. Some three months later, he made an unsuccessful bid
for power and was arrested by his Kremlin colleagues, including
Khrushchev.
The "Beria affair" and the shake-up in the Kremlin that
followed his arrest had far-reaching consequences for the role of
the police in Soviet society. The party leadership not only
arrested and later executed Beria and several of his allies in the
MVD but also took measures to place the political police under its
firm control. Henceforth, violence was no longer to be used as a
means of settling conflicts within the leadership, and widespread
terror was not employed against the population at large.
Data as of May 1989
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