NKVD

The Soviet interior commissariat that ran the secret police during the Great Terror

Overview

The NKVD absorbed the political police, the OGPU, in 1934 and became the instrument of the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, carrying out mass arrests, show trials and executions and administering the Gulag labor camp system. Under chiefs Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria, the first two of whom were themselves shot, it also ran foreign intelligence, including the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, and carried out the Katyn massacre of Polish officers the same year. Its state security functions passed through a series of successor bodies to the KGB, formed in 1954.