Destruction battalions (NKVD)
섬멸대대 (NKVD)
Paramilitary units created under the NKVD right after the German invasion of 1941 for repression and internal security in the Soviet-occupied Baltic states and the western Soviet Union. Restored after 1944 as an auxiliary force against the Forest Brothers and their supporters, they were dissolved in 1954.
In depth
Called istrebiteli (“destroyers”) in Russian, they were known to Lithuanians as stribai. In 1941 they secured the Red Army’s rear and destroyed property that could not be evacuated under the scorched-earth policy, with authority to execute suspicious persons summarily; in Estonia they murdered 1,850 people that year.
Re-formed from local volunteers after the German retreat, the battalions were renamed “people’s defence” in 1945–1946. They terrorised actual and potential supporters of the Forest Brothers, joined ambushes and search patrols, and enforced Soviet policy in the countryside, for instance by forcing farmers to fulfil forestry, peat-cutting and road-building obligations. In Estonia the party’s First Secretary, Nikolai Karotamm, headed their central staff. Each operative team in Operation Priboi in March 1949 included two destruction battalion members. In 2002 the Estonian parliament declared the battalions a criminal organisation.