Cheka, OGPU and NKVD

Soviet citizens never stopped calling their secret policemen Chekists, whatever the organization's letterhead said. The name came from the first of the line, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, created by Lenin's government on 20 December 1917 and known by its Russian initials as the VChK, or Cheka. Over the next three decades it was renamed the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD, and in 1954 its state security functions settled into the KGB^1,6,7.

The Cheka, 1917–1922

The Cheka was meant to be temporary, and at first it was only to investigate. Under Felix Dzerzhinsky it quickly took the power to arrest, judge and shoot. In the Library of Congress's summary, it "soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism"^1,6.

The turning point came after the killing of the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky and the shooting of Lenin on 30 August 1918. On 5 September the Council of People's Commissars decreed the Red Terror⁶. The American consul in Moscow, DeWitt Clinton Poole, forwarded the interior commissar's instructions to local soviets: take hostages from the bourgeoisie and officer classes, and shoot them "without fail" at the first sign of resistance². On 9 September he reported about 150 shootings a night in Moscow and more than 1,000 people shot in retaliation for the attempt on Lenin, and wrote that the foreign commissariat had little influence over the "extraordinary commission which is carrying on the carnage"³.

The Cheka also ran the first forced-labor camps, put down peasant and worker revolts, and by 1921 commanded internal troops numbering at least 200,000^1,6.

GPU and OGPU, 1922–1934

On 6 February 1922 the Cheka was dissolved and its functions given to the State Political Directorate (GPU), reorganized for the whole Soviet Union in November 1923 as the OGPU^6,7. The Library of Congress notes that repression at first eased under the GPU; under Stalin its powers grew again¹.

Abroad, the OGPU waged what a CIA reviewer in 1970 called "a ruthless campaign by the Soviet services to destroy the Russian emigré groups abroad"⁴. Its counterintelligence department invented resistance movements to deceive its enemies: Sindikat-2 brought the terrorist Boris Savinkov home to trial in 1924, and the Trust, a fake monarchist underground, fooled émigré leaders and Western services until 1927 and drew Sidney Reilly to his death⁴. The same reviewer credited the OGPU and its successors with the kidnappings of the émigré generals Alexander Kutepov in Paris in 1930 and Yevgeny Miller in 1937^4,7.

At home the OGPU ran the deportations of collectivization and expanded the Gulag^1,7.

NKVD, 1934–1946

On 10 July 1934 the OGPU was folded into a new all-Union People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, as its Main Directorate of State Security. The NKVD now controlled the ordinary police, border troops and the camps as well as the political police^1,7. In the Library of Congress's words, it became "a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s"¹.

The Great Terror peaked under Nikolai Yezhov, who headed the NKVD from 1936 to 1938. Mass operations such as those launched by NKVD Order No. 00447 were judged by extrajudicial troikas, and in 1937 and 1938 alone at least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 executed, by the NKVD's own records⁷. Yezhov's predecessor Genrikh Yagoda and Yezhov himself were in turn arrested and shot; Lavrentiy Beria took over in 1938⁷.

The NKVD's foreign department hunted Stalin's enemies abroad. Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in Mexico City by the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader on 20 August 1940 and died the next day⁷. In March 1940 the Politburo approved Beria's proposal to shoot Polish officers, police and others held since the Soviet invasion of 1939; about 22,000 were killed at Katyn and other sites⁸. A US House select committee concluded in 1952 that the evidence "proves conclusively and irrevocably the Soviet NKVD" committed the Katyn massacre⁵. The Soviet government admitted it on 13 April 1990⁸.

In wartime, NKVD state security was split off in 1941 and again from 1943 as a separate commissariat, the NKGB. Its officers ran radio games against German intelligence such as Operation Monastery, while its foreign intelligence service, alongside the military GRU, obtained nuclear weapons information from the Manhattan Project (atomic espionage)⁷. In March 1946 the commissariats became ministries, the MVD and the MGB⁷.

A note on names

Western writers have often lumped every Soviet service together. The CIA reviewer of 1970 complained of exactly this, pointing out that operations against émigrés were the business of the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD, while military intelligence, the GRU, was a separate service with separate networks⁴.

Operations in these files

OPERATION · 1921 1921 – 13 April 1927 Operation Trust For six years the Soviet secret police ran a fake monarchist underground, the 'Trust', that fed émigrés and Western services disinformation and lured Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly to their deaths. 12 May 1922 – 29 August 1924 Operation Sindikat-2 An OGPU deception of 1922–1924 that invented an underground party inside Soviet Russia to draw the old terrorist Boris Savinkov home. He crossed the border in August 1924 and walked into a trap. OPERATION · 1934 1934 – 23 January 1963 The Cambridge Five Five Cambridge graduates recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s reached MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office and Bletchley Park, and were exposed one by one between 1951 and 1990. 1938 – 3 May 1945 The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) Rote Kapelle was the German counterintelligence name for Soviet radio networks in Belgium, France and the Netherlands and for a Berlin resistance circle that passed secrets to Moscow. Most were rounded up in 1942. OPERATION · 1941 July 1941 – August 1944 Operation Monastery An NKVD radio game of 1941–1944 in which the agent Alexander Demyanov, 'Heine', posed as the Abwehr's man in Moscow, fed German intelligence disinformation and drew its couriers into arrest. September 1941 – June 1950 Soviet atomic espionage (Enormoz) How Soviet intelligence penetrated the Manhattan Project under the codename ENORMOZ, who its sources were, how Venona and confessions exposed them, and what the stolen secrets were worth.

Operations against the Cheka–NKVD

1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean.