NKVD Order No. 00447

00447 of July 30, 1937 (Russian: О операции по репрессированию бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов, romanized: O operatsii po repressirovaniyu byvshikh kulakov, ugolovnikov i drugikh antisovetskikh elementov, lit.

[2] One instance on July 23, 1938, the Omsk NKVD chief named Gorbach requested an increased limit of thousands of more executions, since his men had already fulfilled their plan.

By the autumn of 1937, the pressure to achieve arrests was so great that the NKVD interrogators began picking out names from the telephone directory or preselecting married men with children who, as every agent knew, were the quickest to confess.

[3] After this Order, the terms First/Second Category became standard abbreviations in NKVD documentation for "the highest measure of punishment" and "placing into corrective labor camps", respectively.

The article III the Order of Conducting the Operation instructed to start the action for securing the anti-Soviet social elements on August 5, 1937, and finish it in four-month term.