His family knew he had been arrested because shortly afterwards, NKVD agents searched the apartment. They confiscated 870 loose-leaf pages, 6 notebooks and 33 business cards.

Such an inhumane obsession over the raw number of arrests — rather than a calculated push to deport “the worst of the worst” ...

He was buried at an NKVD shooting ground on Moscow's southern outskirts known as Kommunarka -- the final resting place of thousands executed by the Soviet secret police between 1937 and 1941.

Stepan Karagodin, a peasant, was arrested by NKVD officers in Tomsk in 1937, during the Great Purge. He was tried by a so-called dvoika (a “pair”: a senior NKVD officer and a prosecutor) ...

Grechukhin, like many of the NKVD killers who rose to prominence under NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, who was himself arrested in 1938 and executed in 1940, was arrested in December 1938, and executed ...

The NKVD’s infamous Order No. 00447, which followed on July 30, allotted quotas for 75,950 executions and 193,000 prison sentences. These “limits” were forgotten as regions competed for ...

The NKVD arrested 20 of the sisters, including Boniszewska. "From the beginning she was considered a charlatan, a false saint and an enemy of the system," Skubisz noted.

They include a key letter to then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin from secret police (NKVD) chief Lavrenty Beria, dated 5 March 1940 and marked "Top Secret". Some 22,000 members of the Polish elite were ...

But the system in which he had placed his faith ultimately betrayed him, as it did so many Communists of his era: One day late in 1937, Joseph Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, snatched ...