Operational Order No. 00447
By Sean at 5 August, 2007, 5:13 pm
Seventy years ago today the infamous Operational Order No. 00447 was approved by the Politburo of the Soviet Union. The Order launched, according to the document, “a campaign of punitive measures against former kulaks, active anti-soviet elements, and criminals.” In the appending memo to Stalin’s personal secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev, M. P. Frinovsky, then deputy commissar of the NKVD, wrote, “I ask that you send the decree to members of the Politburo for their vote, and please send an extract of relevant items to Comrade Ezhov.”
Dated 30 July 1937, the document outlines which groups would be subjected to “punitive measures,” how they would be carried out, and provided execution and arrest quotas for every oblast and autonomous republic.
The document split those subject to “punitive measures” into two categories. The document reads:
- “To the first category belong all the most active of the above mentioned elements [kulaks, former Whites, criminals, Mensheviks and other anti-soviet parties, fascists, religious sectarians, etc]. They are subject to immediate arrest and, after consideration of their case by the troikas, to be shot.
- To the second category belong all the remaining less active but nonetheless hostile elements. They are subject to arrest and to confinement in concentration camps for a term ranging from 8 to 10 years, while the most vicious and socially dangerous among them are subject to confinement for similar terms in prisons as determined by the troikas.”
Quotas for the first category range from 100 (in Komi ASSR and Kalmuk ASSR, for example) to 5000 (in Western Siberia, Moscow oblast, and Azov-Black Sea). Estimates for the second category ranged from 300 (again in Komi and Kalmuk) to 30,000 (Moscow).
The quotas were merely guidelines for execution and arrest. Considering that they all end in zeros says that the Party had no idea how many “anti-Soviet elements” roamed the country. The quotas were merely estimates presumably made from local NKVD reports. The quotas give a total estimate of 50,950 in the first category and 167,200 in the second category. A grand total of 218,150 persons. The order essentially transfered almost all criminal proceedings to NKVD troikas in 1937-38. According to figures released by the Russian Government in 1995, troikas handed down 688,000 sentences or 87% of all criminal sentences in the USSR in 1937 and 75% in 1938. A total of 681,692 people were sentenced to be shot in 1937-38, with 92.6% of those sentences handed down by troikas.
What is interesting about the Order is where it placed the power to deem an individual (and/or their family members) subject to “punitive measures.” Troikas (three man commissions) were to comprise of commissars of the republic’s NKVD or by regional departments. The minutes of the troikas investigation were the sole legal basis for a person’s execution or arrest. The day to day implementation of the mass operations was essentially outside the purview of central organs. Stalin basically handed local NKVD agents the power to wipe out their local rivals. And a bloodbath ensued. Most of the victims of this blind terror were regular people, most without any political connections at all.
An English translation of Operational Order 00447 can be found in J. Arch Getty, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, p. 473-480.
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Comments
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Short article that puts a human face on the 70th anniversary Operational Order No. 00447.
Another one on the topic by the same author.
I was born about 9,000 km (5,600 mi) from my father’s place of birth because of this order.
His family moved there by own “will” as other option was to be sent even further by order.
On the other hand Russia was able to keep its East and North territories and develop them. Because my wife’s mother went their by her real will. And my wife’s teachers were almost 100% graduates from best Soviet universities (as many camp prisoners were living there even after release from camps).
As I joke – once the Russia was the country of most educated prisoners. Then it became the country of most educated floor cleaners and prodavzov.
Wasn’t one of the reasons for the Gulag precisely to obtain labor to develop inhospital areas?
Depends what you mean and when you date the beginning of the Gulag. The first Soviet camps like the infamous one at Solovki monastery were created to house prisoners from the Civil War. In the early 1920s Solovki had mostly average criminals, but also politicals–anarchists and socialists. They latter were given special rights until a massacre in 1924. All the politicals were subsequently transfered out to other camps.
Later camps were chiefly there to house exiles. The ones that were labor camps were for mostly for mining, timber, extraction.
If anything Gulag related, the deportation of kulaks and other ethnic groups might have been for the development of inhospitable places.
But in the 1930s, there were campaigns for this too. A colleague of mine wrote her dissertation on the Khetagorivite movement of the late 1930s which urged women to move to the Far East. Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign too.
I think it would be an interesting study if someone compared the Tsarist exile system with the Soviet.
My understanding always was that “Gulags” were created about 1929 and its use for any prison or labor camp before that time was a somewhat retroactive naming convention.
It is a fairly specific term (Главное Управление Исправительно—Трудовых Лагерей и колоний) that gets thrown around and overused. It isn’t as though the Soviet Union invented the concept of putting people (criminals or others) in jails and making them work either. That sort of thing goes rather deep in human history.
Where the Soviets might have raised the bar is its application towards people they just didn’t like.
I need a secret police, so I can round you guys up and exile you to my office to do my work for me.
Hey, was there a prison system outside the Gulag camps, or did everybody convicted of anything get sent to the camps? I’ve wondered about that.
What cosmic irony that at the same time as this anniversary in the USA they vote to dismantle the FISA court and unleash the possibility for mass warrant-less surveillance? Ironiya sudbi ili tragediya.