First Category / Second Category (NKVD)

What the order said and how the categories worked

NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 defined former kulaks, active anti-Soviet elements, and criminal recidivists as the mass targets of repression, and set the operation to begin on 5 August 1937 in every republic, krai and oblast, with later starting dates for some Central Asian republics and for Siberian and Far Eastern territories. The order split the repressed into two categories. The first category covered the 'most hostile' of the listed elements, who were to be arrested at once and, after review by a troika, shot. The second covered the 'less active but nonetheless hostile' elements, who were to be sent to camps for terms of eight to ten years, the most dangerous of them to prisons for the same term.

Troikas and quotas

Cases went through a speedy, simplified investigation and were handed to a troika, an extra-judicial three-man panel chaired by the local NKVD chief and normally including the republican, krai or oblast procurator and the party secretary. It ruled in the absence of the accused, and its verdicts, once the quota was approved, required no further confirmation. The order fixed quotas for both categories in each region and republic. The initial totals were 269,100 persons, of whom 76,000 were to be shot, with the largest allowances for Moscow and its region, western Siberia, the southern Urals, Leningrad and its region, and Ukraine. The text stressed that the limits were estimates and could not be exceeded without Yezhov's personal approval, but approvals were routine and local competition drove the figures far past the original limits. On 15 October 1937 the Politburo added 120,000 (63,000 first category, 57,000 second), and on 31 January 1938 a further 57,200.

Who was classified

The categories were defined by the elastic phrase 'anti-Soviet elements'. They enumerated former kulaks who had escaped camps or labour settlements and continued anti-Soviet activity; members of anti-Soviet parties; former White officers, gendarmes, officials and punitive detachment men; church and sectarian activists; participants in Cossack and White Guard rebel organisations; and habitual thieves, swindlers and smugglers. A person did not have to be a proven spy or terrorist to fall into the classification, and the simplified procedure meant it could in practice be applied to almost anyone.

Method and outcome

Confessions were manufactured. Interrogations ran for days without interruption, beatings were routine, and investigation units had a 'casework minimum' of confessions to extract. Cases then went to the troika, which sat without the accused and delivered either a death sentence or a ten-year camp term. Sentences were carried out at night in prisons or secluded NKVD grounds, and were not announced to the condemned: relatives were simply told the person had received a ten-year camp term with no right to correspond. By the time the operation was stopped on 17 November 1938 by a secret directive signed by Stalin, official accounting recorded over 767,000 persons condemned, of whom 387,000 were shot. The first category, the shooting category, made up 49.3% of the Kulak Operation, compared with 73.6% in the National Operations.

Historical assessment

The system turned an abstract threat into administratively processable categories. Quotas, troikas and category labels made mass execution a routine procedure whose outcome was fixed independently of any real evidence of counter-revolution. The halt of 17 November 1938 was not a restoration of innocence: the executor changed from Yezhov to Beria, the mass operation ended, but the machinery and the responsibility remained.