Frinovsky handled the dirty work, writing up NKVD Operational Order No. 00447 (dated July 31), which Stalin approved. (The 00 indicated supersecrecy.) “The organs of state security are faced with the task of mercilessly crushing this entire gang of anti-Soviet elements,” the order noted, demanding “an end once and for all to the foul subversion of the Soviet state’s foundations.”110 Every
The NKVD sliced through the populace like a reaper through the wheat fields. Nothing fundamental had changed in “kulak sabotage,” crime rates, or Gulag labor needs. Locally, the kulak operation sometimes had little to do with former kulaks. In the Perm region of the Urals province (where former KGB archives have been accessible), the majority of the targets were workers and white-collar functionaries. Here, supersecret order 00447 extended carte blanche to local operatives for eradicating “conspiracies” they were already “unmasking,” as reflected in their mounting NKVD reports dating to fall 1936 and especially spring 1937 (following central plenums and directives). The local pattern resembled the spread of a virus—after one person got arrested, his or her associates got infected with their “guilt,” a reaction that was then repeated, in an ever-widening way.115
At the same time regional secret police officials could no more start massmurdering the populace without central directives than they could continue to do so after central directives instructed them to halt.116 What happened was that Stalin decided on mass murder, and he could count on Frinovsky at the center and the Mironovs in the locales to implement it.117
Parallel “national” operations did not use quotas, but a nationality itself was a kind of quota.118 Every person among Soviet nationalities with a corresponding nation-state outside the USSR became a potential NKVD target. To be sure, sweeping ethnic deportations had begun earlier.119 But such actions expanded exponentially: the entire population of ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Far East were deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they would dig holes for “housing.” The sheer scale of the action against Soviet Koreans—135,000 deported by late October 1937 and as many as 185,000 eventually—gave rise to complications, which provoked Stalin’s ire. “People who sabotage the action, no matter who they might be, arrest forthwith and punish,” he wrote to the top officials in the Soviet Far East.120 Regional NKVD offices also now put together “albums” of foreigners and ethnics in their localities, rating the personages by degree of suspicion. Soviet ethnic Poles were the main targets: 144,000 were arrested and 111,000 executed, nearly half of all the non-Russian nationals killed.121, 122 (There were around 636,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union.) “Very good!” the ethnic Georgian Stalin wrote on a report by Yezhov, a closet part ethnic Lithuanian. “Dig down and cleanse this Polish-espionage filth. Destroy it in the interests of the USSR!”123