Former people

The expression went into a wide circulation in the Russian Empire after the 1897 short story of Maxim Gorky, Бывшие люди, translated in English as Creatures That Once Were Men, about people fallen from prosperity into an abyss of misery.

In fact, during the wave of repressions after the assassination of Sergey Kirov, NKVD carried out Operation "Former People", in the course of which during March 1935 over 11,000 of "former people" were arrested or deported from Leningrad (whose Communist Party organization Kirov headed and where he was killed), according to Directive No.

[2] In April, NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda expanded[3] the scope of the operation to cleanse the border region of Leningrad Oblast and Karelian ASSR from further 22,000 "formers".

[4] During the peak of the Great Purge, the cleansing of the country from the "former people" was explained by the necessity to eliminate the "insurgence base" in the case of a war.

[7] Historian Douglas Smith's book, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, traces the calamities of two representative aristocratic families, the Golitsyns and the Sheremetevs.