X-Nico

14 unusual facts about NKVD


Augustyn Träger

After the war, in July 1945, he was arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned by the Polish secret police, as part of a general communist reprisal against former soldiers of the Home Army, and other anti-Nazi (but non-communist) resistance groups.

Belarusian resistance during World War II

Later NKVD, SMERSH and GRU began training special groups of future partisans (effectively, special forces units) in the rear and dropping them in the occupied territories.

Chaim Yehoshua Halberstam

The first Rabbi Chaim Yehoshua Halberstam was arrested by the NKVD during World War II and died of starvation in the Tashkent prison on 19 November 1944, leaving a young wife, Leika, and two sons, Yaakov Yosef and Boruch Duvid.

David Baazov

During the purge of 1938, both of his sons were arrested by the Soviet NKVD and Gerzel was executed.

Gertrude Kahn

Ray Kahn, was an American who allegedly had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence during World War II.

Ivan Agayants

Ivan Ivanovich Agayants (ru: Иван Иванович Агаянц) (28 August 1911 – 12 May 1968) was a leading Soviet NKVD/KGB intelligence officer of Armenian origin.

Kolau Nadiradze

Nevertheless, in the purge of 1937, Nadiradze was arrested along with the fellow symbolist writer Sergo Kldiashvili, but both of them were saved only by chance: their NKVD interrogator was himself arrested and the files mislaid.

Len Wincott

In 1946, he was accused of being a British spy and duly arrested by the NKVD.

Leopold Lewin

Arrested by NKVD, he became a Polish communist, joining the Union of Polish Patriots there, and was an author of many socrealistic poems (like 'Song of United Parties' - 'Pieśń Partii Zjednoczonych').

Mariyka Pidhiryanka

As a teacher, poet and Ukrainian patriot she would have been a likely target of the NKVD, both before the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941 and during Joseph Stalin's post-war campaign against Ukrainian nationalism.

Michał Vituška

The NKVD had already infiltrated these units, and by mid 1950s they were neutralized.

People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs units dressed as Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighters

From the November 1944 NKVD starting usage of so-called “special groups” composed from voluntarily surrendered OUN and UPA members and, sometimes, 1 of NKVD communication officer.

Special Council of the NKVD

Special Council of the USSR NKVD (Особое Совещание при НКВД СССР, ОСО) was created by the same decree of Sovnarkom of July 10, 1934 that introduced the NKVD itself.

Zelman Passov

Zelman Isaevich Passov Зельман Исаевич Пассов (1905, Staraya Russa, Russia - 15 February 1940) headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service, then part of the NKVD from June to November 1938, when he was arrested.


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154th Preobrazhensky Independent Commandant's Regiment

As the Second World War was beginning to end in Europe in 1944 the Soviet NKVD in Moscow was charged with raising a full-time honor guard company as part of the 1st Regiment, OMSDON (then the NKVD 1st Special Duties Division), in the style and manner of the British Household Division's Foot Guards, the 3rd US Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) and the French Republican Guard's First Infantry Regiment.

Aleksandras Stulginskis

In 1941 Stulginskis and his wife were arrested by the Soviet NKVD and deported to a gulag in the Krasnoyarsk region, while his wife was deported to the Komi area.

Ales Bialiatski

One notable event he helped to organize was a memorial ceremony at Kurapaty, the site of thousands of killings by the NKVD in the late 1930s.

Alexander Ulanovsky

(Josephson returned to America and worked as a lawyer representing Socialist clients of the Café Society. Mink went to Spain where he served as an NKVD assassin during the Civil War, and then disappeared from the historical record.)

Arnold Deutsch

Among theories which have been proposed by various authors, Deutsch was said to have been captured and shot by the Nazis after parachuting into Austria; or as having drowned when his ship was sunk by a U-boat while en route to New York, where he was supposed to work with NKVD recruits.

Auergesellschaft

However, in mid-May 1945, with the assistance of Riehl’s colleague Karl Günter Zimmer, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich showed up one day in NKVD colonel’s uniforms.

Bill Weisband

The codebreaker Meredith Gardner recalled that Weisband had watched him extract a list of Western atomic scientists from a December 1944 NKVD message.

Chekism

In this context, the adjective Chekist (from Cheka, the first Soviet secret police organization) emphasizes the importance and political power of Cheka and its successor Soviet and Russian secret police services, such as the NKVD, KGB, and FSB.

To tell that NKVD is a body of mass inquisition also tells nothing to the point, because Gestapo also was a mass inquisition, although its chief Heinrich Himmler—would not be fit to serve as a sergeant of the Soviet State Security Service.

Cursed soldiers

The Battle of Kuryłówka fought against the Soviet 2nd Border Regiment of the NKVD, ended in a victory for the underground forces commanded by Major Franciszek Przysiężniak ("Marek").

Heinrich Scherhorn

Kept in solitary confinement in the infamous Lubyanka prison and constantly interrogated, he was given the choice of either cooperating with the NKVD or face charges for alleged war crimes due to the fact, that his regiment had performed Anti partisan duties.

Henryk Ehrlich

However, on 4 December 1941, Erlich, together with Victor Alter were once again arrested by the NKVD in Kuybyshev.

Ivan Serov

Serov became the Ukrainian Commissar of the NKVD in 1939, and from this point onwards he played a major role in many of the actions of the Soviet secret police in World War II, helping to organize the deportation of the Chechens and the peoples of the Baltic States, becoming Beria's primary lieutenant in 1941.

José Robles

Rather, it was suggested that he was among many sincere left-wingers (for example, Andrés Nin) killed by Soviet NKVD agents, led by Alexander Orlov, for their independent stance at the time.

When Berzin disputed with NKVD official Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov about the relative priority to be given to preserving the military efficiency of Spanish Republican forces vs. conducting NKVD purges of Spanish Anarchists, POUM etc., and lost the favor of Stalin as a result, then Robles' knowledge of behind-the-scenes Soviet maneuverings in Spain became highly inconvenient to the Soviets.

Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki

Agnieszka, who was an active member of the Polish resistance, was arrested by the German occupiers, tortured in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw and then executed in Palmiry mass murder site, while Janina Lewandowska was the only woman murdered by the Soviet NKVD during the Katyn massacre.

Kiberg

After a few weeks, they were freed and sent Murmansk, the men agreeing to enrol in the Northern Fleet or the NKVD, while the women and children were sent on to Shadrinsk to work on a state farm.

Leonid Nikolaev

As Nikolaev's troubles grew, he became steadily more obsessed with the idea of "striking a blow." On October 15, 1934, he was arrested by the NKVD, allegedly for loitering around the Smolny Institute, where Sergei Kirov, the popular administrator of the Leningrad district, had his offices.

Main Directorate of State Security

On February 3, 1941, the Special Sections (or. OO) of the GUGB-NKVD (responsible for counter-intelligence in the military) became part of the Army and Navy (RKKA and RKKF, respectively).

Maslennikov

Ivan Maslennikov (1900–1954), General of the Army, Soviet military and NKVD commander during World War II

Maurice Halperin

Halperin's NKVD code name was 'Hare', and he became a member of the Golos spy network operated by the NKVD's chief of American espionage operations Gaik Ovakimian.

Michał Zygmunt Tyszkiewicz

The couple adopted Jan Tyszkiewicz, son of Michał Tyszkiewicz's brother, who had been murdered by the NKVD in 1940.

Mieczyslaw Norwid-Neugebauer

Baruch Steinberg The Chief Rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces murdered by the Soviet NKVD

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov

In 1937-1939, he reconstructed three faces from skulls of the USSR Academy a Sciences - a Papuan, a Kazakh and Khevsur Caucasian, and performed numerous forensic reconstructions for the NKVD.

Nieborów Palace

In February 1945, the Radziwiłł family was deported by the NKVD to a labour camp in Krasnogorsk.

Nikolai Skoblin

In the film the character known as "Mitya" (Oleg Menshikov) is a former White Army officer turned NKVD agent.

Nikolaus Riehl

Soon after being taken to the Soviet Union, Riehl, von Ardenne, Hertz, and Volmer were summoned for a meeting with Lavrentij Beria, head of the NKVD and the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Nikolay Dyatlenko

Together with Major Aleksandr Mikhailovich Smyslov from Red Army Intelligence, Dyatlenko was chosen by NKVD and Red Army officers to deliver notice of truce to the beleaguered German forces in the Kessel at the Battle of Stalingrad.

Pavel Zhigarev

The Air Force, or VVS as it was then called, suffered particularly badly in the Purge, and Zhigarev's three predecessors (Aleksandr Loktionov, Yakov Smushkevich, and Pavel Rychagov) were all executed in 1941 by the NKVD for perceived military failures.

Polish Armed Forces in the East

The formation began to organise in the Buzuluk area, and recruitment begun in the NKVD camps for Polish POWs.

Polish Workers' Party

In April 1946, a new volunteer citizen militia ORMO was formed to help the criminal police (Milicja Obywatelska), political police (UBP), internal troops (KBW), Polish army, Soviet political police (NKVD), and Soviet army to eliminate any armed opposition to the government.

Pyotr Fedotov

Pyotr Vasileevich Fedotov (1900–1963) was long time Soviet security and intelligence officer, head of counterintelligence in NKVD/NKGB and head of foreign intelligence as the deputy chairman of the Committee of Information.

Soviet Latvia

MV Sovetskaya Latviya (Soviet Latvia), a transport ship operated by the Soviet industrial concern Dalstroy, a part of the NKVD's forced labour system.

Vasili Blokhin

--The initial quota of 300 was lowered by Blokhin to 250 after the first night, when it was decided that all further executions should take place in total darkness.--> The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and trucked, twice a night, to Mednoye, where Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose of bodies at an unfenced site.

Vidnoye, Moscow Oblast

The Sukhanovka prison was established by the NKVD in 1938 on the grounds of the old Ekaterinskaia Pustyn' Monastery.

Weisband

Bill Weisband (1908–1967), American cryptanalyst and NKVD agent

Yertsevo

Captured by the NKVD in early 1940 as a Polish army soldier soon after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Herling-Grudziński spent a year and a half in the Yertsevo camp.