NKVD troika
NKVD troika or Special troika (Russian: особая тройка, romanized: osobaya troyka), in Soviet history, were the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD which would later be the beginning of the KGB) made up of three officials who issued sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public trial.
These commissions were employed as instruments of extrajudicial punishment introduced to supplement the Soviet legal system with a means for quick and secret execution or imprisonment.
[2] It began as an institution of the Cheka, then later became prominent again in the NKVD, when it was used during the Great Purge to execute many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.
The outcome of such trials was often predetermined before it even began due to targeted numbers of citizens to be executed or imprisoned in Gulag prison camps.
Normal legal procedures were suspended and the corresponding OGPU order of the 2nd of February, specified the measures needed for "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class".
The first Troika consisted of Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev (who was also heavily involved with the Great Purge and Show trial), and Nikolai Bulganin.
00447 by July 30, 1937 О репрессировании бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов ("Concerning the repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements") undersigned by Nikolai Yezhov.
00447 was finally stopped, on November 17, 1938, by the Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation, issued jointly by the Sovnarkom and Central Committee of the CPSU, it is estimated that up to 767,000 persons had been condemned, of whom 387,000 had been executed by shooting.
[11] On August 11, 1937, following a Politburo top-secret resolution taken two days earlier, Nikolai Yezhov issued another secret directive, Order No.
00485, aimed at "the complete liquidation of local branches of the Polish Military Organization (POW) and its networks of spies, wreckers and terrorists in industry, transport and agriculture".
Germans were among the top nationalities being repressed and eliminated in Soviet Russia during the thirties while Stalin prepared for war with Hitler.
[13] In total around 60 high-ranking members of the Agro-Joint staff were arrested, most of whom were tried and sentenced by NKVD Troikas on the grounds of being counter-revolutionaries, nationalists, or spies.
[16] Though conditions were tough and approximately 2/3rds of the original settlers left upon seeing that things were not as promised, those that remained founded Birofeld, the first Jewish collective farm in 1928.
[16] In 1936, barely a year after the official recognition as an Autonomous Region, The Great Terror began and the Jewish Party leadership both in Moscow and Birobidzhan was decimated by arrests and fast trials (by troika), resulting in either imprisonment or execution on charges such as "bourgeois nationalism" or being spies for the Germans.
According to the released documents, the executions were authorized by a troika consisting of Vsevolod Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Leonid Bashtakov.
