Troika

Three phases

The troika appeared in three periods in different forms. The first was the civil war, when the Cheka ran three-member commissions that determined punishment without trial. The second was collectivization, when OGPU order No. 44/21 of 1930 established regional troikas to process kulak cases. The third was the Great Purge, when order No. 00447 of 1937 placed special troikas at republic, krai, and oblast level.

The 1937 composition bound politics, security, and prosecution into one seat. The regional NKVD chief, the first secretary of the party committee, and the prosecutor sat together, so that legal review and political decision were not separated.

Procedure

Procedure worked by list rather than by case. Protocols and summaries prepared by investigators were submitted as lists, and the troika approved the list in session while assigning each person to the first or second category. The first category meant shooting, the second usually eight to ten years in the camps.

The accused did not appear and had no counsel. No appeal existed, and sentences were carried out locally at once. Records survive of several hundred cases disposed of in a single day, which shows that individual hearing was not a form that obtained at all.

Scale and abolition

In the operations under order No. 00447 the troikas sentenced roughly 767,000 people, of whom more than 387,000 were shot. To this are added sentences handed down under the separate procedure used for the national operations, the so-called two-member commissions.

A joint decision of the Politburo and Sovnarkom on 17 November 1938 halted the mass operations and abolished the troikas. The function of sentencing outside the courts passed to the NKVD Special Board, which continued on a reduced scale until it was abolished in 1953.

In Soviet legal history the troika is treated as a case of the institutionalization of a state of exception. Punishment without trial, once introduced as an emergency measure, was used repeatedly with only the form of procedure remaining, which makes the troika the connecting point between the practice of the Red Terror and the mass operations of 1937.