OGPU troika (extrajudicial commission)

Establishment

The OGPU troika was an extrajudicial body created to process kulaks during collectivization. On 30 January 1930 the Politburo adopted 'On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization' and divided kulaks into three categories. The heads of first-category households were arrested and their cases passed to a special troika made up of OGPU, regional party committee and procuracy representatives. The Politburo authorized regional troikas; in each region a state police officer, a local party secretary and a procurator sat together and decided on death or exile quickly and without right of appeal.

Order No. 44/21

OGPU Order No. 44/21 of 2 February 1930 gave the security police a concrete mandate. It demanded that a crushing blow be struck against the kulaks, especially their richer and active counter-revolutionary part, and defined as the first category those who resisted and disrupted party and state measures for the socialist reconstruction of agriculture. Capital punishment was reserved for the organizers among them, and the OGPU was assigned quotas of 60,000 persons for the labour camps and 150,000 for exile. Local execution had already escaped central control.

Operation

The troika's session came closer to processing a list than to hearing a case. Decisions were in fact taken without extensive investigation, kulak families were deported and their property confiscated. Local authorities enlarged the first category well beyond the central quotas, so executions far exceeded the plan. The prevailing assessment today is that the repression expanded in this way contributed to the rural famine of 1932-1933.

Institutional lineage

The troika first appeared under the Cheka in 1918 and was revived for the kulak operations in 1930. After the OGPU was dissolved and absorbed into the NKVD in July 1934 the NKVD troika took its place, and under Order No. 00447 of 1937 it grew into the mass instrument of the Great Purge. The OGPU troika is the middle link in that lineage.

Procedural defects

The troika is classified as a quasi-judicial body, but its procedure did not meet the form of a trial. Defendants were given neither counsel nor the presumption of innocence, and troika members considered themselves to judge by common sense and socialist revolutionary principles rather than by statute. Verdicts normally recorded only the charge and the sentence rather than concrete evidence, and the outcome was often settled before the session began. Appeal against sentence was not institutionally guaranteed, and sentences were carried out locally at once. In this respect it functioned in the same period and with the same three-member composition as the NKVD troikas documented in this dictionary.

Assessment

Soviet legal writing of the 1970s and 1980s treated the body as an ordinary form of extrajudicial coercion. The legal invalidation of the OGPU troika's own verdicts, however, did not enter the agenda of reform, and only in October 1991, on the eve of the Soviet collapse, did the Russian Supreme Soviet recognize the extrajudicial mass repression of the Stalin period as anti-constitutional and annul its decisions. OGPU-era statistics listed capital punishment in aggregate, which is why the number of death sentences pronounced by the OGPU troikas alone cannot be precisely counted today.