The NKVD: from Pen-Pushers to Communist Hit Squads - WW2 Special
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- čas přidán 14. 12. 2020
- The NKVD started out as your regular old Ministry of the Interior. But over time, they grew out to a hugely influential and highly lethal weapon for some of the Soviet Union's leaders.
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Written by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
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We have been talking about the NKVD a lot in our War Against Humanity episodes and in several Between Two Wars episodes. If you found this video to be interesting, I can highly recommend you try our B2W episode on the Great Terror and Military Purges in 1938. It provides some crucial context that we couldn't expand on in this special episode. You can find it right here: czcams.com/video/MNnK0LAoyMo/video.html
Cheers,
Joram
Other videos about the NKVD we mentioned in this special are:
- War Against Humanity episode covering the Katyn Massacre: czcams.com/video/gd5YhhNcC44/video.html
- War Against Humanity episode covering the Great Prison Massacre: czcams.com/video/kykPusygzOw/video.html
- Biography episode on Richard Sorge: czcams.com/video/fn9NyRfbSOo/video.html
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Interrogators too.
As in torturers.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 'Two Hundred Years Together' has some interesting insights into this topic. You can get it in German, so I presume you haven't read it?
rapists, too.
@Jesus Christ are you really the child of Julius Caeser and Cleopatra?
@@rgbg66 There is a book Gulag a History by Ann Applebaum.
"Why has the NKVD replaced the army all over Moscow? I'm smiling, but I am very fucking furious"- Georgy Zhukov, 1953
The NKVD: when "the shootings will continue until morale improves" wasn't a joke.
When you though Gestapo was bad ass?
The beatings will continue until moral improves😂
@@senorpepper3405 Or at least until quota for confessions is achieved so that enough people can be killed.
Channels like you guys' and The Great War are the MVPs of the internet. I'm glad to be a supporter. You guys rock.
what are MVPs?
@@pm2128 Most valuable player.
@@pm2128
MVP = "Most Valued Player"
It's a term originating from video games at the end of multiplayer games, usually FPS games. At the end of each round the name of the best players under certain categories are shown ("Best pilot," "best K/D ratio," etc) with MVP being the top grade seat.
It has found its way outside of games to exress gratitude to people like a thank you, sometimes as a meme and sometimes to show genuine appreciation.
@@EJ_Red I guess for such an in-depth explanation you might also include some words about what k/d is.
I mean, for a person that is familiar with fps/moba games that would be obvious, but those people wouldn't need the explanation of what an MVP is in the first place :D
History hustle is also good:)
Last time I was this early trotsky didn't have an icepick in his head.
Haha!
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Good one
That made his ears burn
Oooo nice one!
At the risk of splitting hairs, Trotsky was actually killed with an ice axe, not an ice pick. It's a common misconception, even repeated in the lyrics of the 1977 song by The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes'. The real murder weapon, an ice axe, is quite a large tool used in mountaineering. Imagine getting one of those in the head. Ouch!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_axe
An ice pick is a much smaller implement, something that a cocktail server might use, particularly before modern and domestic refrigeration became commonplace.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pick
Spartacus has the best suits. Dressed to the nines.
His tie could have been a bit louder though !!
Shame his style of presentation is copied from Indy Neidell
And that mustache
Truly, he is dressed like a capitalist exploiter of the proletariat and must be eliminated as an obstacle to the people's revolution.
@@bevbevan6189 take a hike commie
When we had "Kazakh literature" classes, I remember that we studied works of so many writers whose life ended in 1937-1938.
During the Soviet years, schoolchildren and students were often interested in the strange deaths of many generals and politicians in 1937-1938.
@@jangrosek4334
Wolfgang Leonhard's ''Child Of The Revolution''
He was in the USSR during this period & the war years.
The 17th soviet congress has a lot of similar correlations.
Try and look up Zhao Ziyang, the secretary general of the CCP who was in favor of democratizaion and refused to sign his name under the order to deploy the army onto the Tiananmen students, on Baidu. All it says is that he was stripped off his titles for an unexaplained reason and that's it, no other context is apparently necessary. His name is basically taboo in the state media.
@@yarpen26
Zhao Ziyang The Just.
It's really sad how the NKVD's crimes are rarely taught in schools anymore, this is why channels like this are so important. Thank you Time Ghost for making these videos!
You guys must have gone to a different school then I did.
@@martijn9568 Exactly. They are are either far-right, or grew up in USSR.
It was interesting. In AP classes, reading Animal Farm, we learned about Stalin's atrocities. But I didn't get the sense that regular classes went into it at all.
They hardly teach Japanese warcrimes too. The Germans always overshadow them
@BossHossGT500 that's correct man....I can say so atleast for an asian education system
The uncle of my grandpa was a Polish policeman, murdered by NKVD in Katyń. Our family didn't know his fate until early 1990s when the so-called Katyń List was published. Hundreds if not thousands of Polish families hoped for decades their loved ones will come back. In communist Poland talking openly and honestly about Katyń was punishable with prison. Only rumors were circulating among people as to what really happened with them in the east.
I'm of half Polish descent. I met a man of that age who somehow made it thru the Soviet Union and eventually became a US citizen. Me being curious I asked him about some of his 'adventures' but he was evasive. I can understand why. May your great uncle and Tommy rest in peace.
Solidarity!
What the Germans and soviets did to Poland was beyond reprehensible. There are no words.
Putin would love to bring that all back to you! Ukraine deals with this terror today!
@@dannyv2468va2facepalm...
Stalin: I'm suspicious of the Poles
NKVD: Did you hear that comrades unleash the bureaucracy!
@@Marinealver that's why it's called *The Red Army*
KATYN FOREST
@@cetus4449 yes
Bad old Feliks Dzherzinsky was a Pole.
& so was Konstantin Rokossovsky (3 broken ribs while in Joel's gaol) who hated Poland,
left Warsaw utterly crushed by the nazis while enjoying the show,
guzzling vodka on the oriental bank of the Vistula.
& in 1956, tried to convince Krustchev to send tanks to crush the Poznan uprising, in a pre-Budapest massacre.
All in all, a very unattractive character.
@@dubya85 Which adipose-leonid tried to bury under Khatyn, Ukraina.
When Stalin was asked by Polish Goverment in Exile about their POWs he said: "Idk where they are, maybe they escaped to Manchuria".
When Churchill asked him about the Polish Officers at dinner, Stalin told him, "we killed them." No big deal to him.
@@terry_robinson Then, they were blaming it on Germans until the collapse of the CCCP.
@@Zhake_the_Mighty_Dragon Not ethnic cleansing, class cleaning. Only officers, which they consider to be part of the bourgeoisie, are murdered.
@@Zhake_the_Mighty_Dragon Stalin kill everyone he felt disloyal to him, he didn't care about their race and ethnicity. If Stalin hate Pole so much, why he entrust Rokossovsky, a Pole, to command his army and then promote to Marshal? Also, Polish POWs in USSR formed 1st & 2nd Polish Army, and fight along side of Red Army.
@@cetus4449 Some evidence points to a large-scale fabrication of the Polish case. There is evidence of repression of citizens other nationalities as Poles in order to exaggerate the role of the Polish threat in Soviet society.
Just to mention the role of Felix Dzerzhinsky , nicknamed "Iron Felix". Born into Polish nobility, from 1917 until his death in 1926 Dzerzhinsky led the first two Soviet state-security organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU, establishing a secret police for the post-revolutionary Soviet regime. He was one of the architects of the Red Terror
As was Salomon Morel and red Judge Helena Brus. Both career NKVD. Clawed way to security.
I think it was Vyachislav Menzhinsky who founded the OGPU.
Ironically, Dzerzhinsky had himself been the victim of similar brutality carried out by the Tsarist government, and ended up in Siberia for a time
no , he was a Litwin , unfortunately
These guys were brutal. Thanks for making a video about this formation. Always wonder if they interviewed ex service men about their brutal tasks.
Big fan of your channel, but I have a question I was hoping you could answer... What was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
I'm sure glad this could never happen in the USA.
@@ToddBoyle As societies degenerate, it could happen anywhere.
.
Most haven't survived until Perestroika and those who did never confessed. I think only Baltic countries actually prosecuted them and maybe their governments have confessions of some NKVD officers.
And SMERSH is a weird abbreviation. Stems from "smert" (death) and "shpion" (spy) and is a sort of a slogan actually: "Death for the spies!". Russian is not my native language but it is pretty similar to Bulgarian (at least 90% of the entire vocabulary).
It is the actual meaning of the abbreviation.
It also sounds like "Smerch" ("tornado"/"whirlwind"), which probably reinforced the image of a relentless fast-moving "justice".
I wasn't aware that Bulgarian and Russian were THAT similar. But as a Pole I do know of Smersz...
@@poiuyt975 Arguably, the modern Russian language is based on the so called Church Slavonic which was arguably Old (Medieval) Bulgarian. Also, the Russian language influenced the modern Bulgarian in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries... So, the relations have been complex.
@@valentinstoyanov304 It's interesting how the Russian derives from Bulgarian, but later influenced it. How the history meanders...
"The NKVD: Just your average ministry of internal affairs." Well ok then
It was for your average totalitarian police state.
Got to keep that homeland good and secure.
Never ask:
Woman age
Man his salary
NKVD where did the Polish officers go...
Which officers? This must be some German propaganda, I never heard of them
@@jakubcesarzdakos5442 For starters …
• Katyń Revisited - Dmitry Bavyrin, 5 March 2020
vz.ru/politics/2020/3/5/1027119.html
• “Massacre in The Katyn Forest By Jewish Bolsheviks”
www.bitchute.com/video/5lG4hQ5aQx5o/
• “The Katyn Massacre 1940” - Thomas Urban
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Katyn-Massacre-1940-Hardback/p/18592
Happy to help with any more questions.
@@juliusskoolafish9672 >by jewish bolsheviks
Hold on bud I'mma stop you right there
Oh my God thought about Katyn too. Never forget
@@sirllamaiii9708 the people who think the NKVD was Jewish can't explain why then Jewish soldiers of the Polish Army - including its chief Rabbi - were also executed in the Katyn Massacre.
One of those families was my uncle Salek, who somehow got out with his wife and son to Palestine and escaped the fate of my grandparents and other family members trapped in Warsaw.
Lucky man
I read this book called "Government House". One of the people the author followed rose through the ranks of the NKVD. What a I found interesting was his vivacious wife. She loved the privileges of being his wife. From access to beautiful clothing, fine dining, social activities, vacations on the Black Sea, and staying in the homes of the former Russian aristocracy. She appeared to be oblivious her loving husband was a key architect in developing the NKVD killing machine. Of course her husband reached the revolution eating its children moment and he was liquidated.
I’m sorry, some sort of upbeat Christmas ad played literally a second before Spartacus said Babi Yar and I think the mood whiplash may have given me a small aneurysm.
CZcams has been putting ads in all videos regardless of whether the producers get the revenue or not. I would recommend an ad block for the best experience
Forest Brothers were good at taking down the NKVD many times one time they even managed to kill 500 NKVD soldiers.
The SMERSH units were heavily heroified during and after the war. A popular Soviet novel "Moment of Truth: August 44" follows a SMERSH unit as they ride around the immediate rear in a lend-leased truck hunting Polish resistance groups and Nazi left-behinds. There is a 2000 Russian movie adaptation, which is pretty good... if you forget the _less heroic_ stuff SMERSH was involved in.
Spartacus, what was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
Mostly working class. Some middle upper class. Rarely from the peasantry.
Plenty of NKVD people were not Russians. Hell, even the founder of Cheka, Feliks Dzierżyński was an ethnic Pole. Some NKVD agents survived well after the organization was long replaced by KGB. Take Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last president of communist Poland in the 1980s. He started his dirty career as an active agent of NKVD.
'Average NKVD operative' is difficult to say because - as the video points out - the NKVD's responsibilities were vast and included lots of ordinary interior ministry duties (firefighting, law and order etc) in addition to being the political police.
If by average NKVD operative you mean average officer of the GUGB (the political police), then I can make an educated guess in saying that people with "proletarian" backgrounds (workers and peasants) would have been preferred as they were considered more reliable for ideological reasons - people with ties to 'counter-revolutionaries' such as kulaks, aristocrats, white army officers etc would have fallen under ideological suspicion. But as with any big bureaucratic structure, exceptions did exist, and certainly ideological commitment was prized over class or ethnicity. The founder of the Soviet secret police was an ethnic Polish nobleman, Felix Dzerzhinsky; Genrikh Yagoda was of Jewish origin; Lavrentiy Beria was a Georgian.
@@Darwinek More interesting information about the leadership of the OGPU, one of the predecessors of the NKVD
After the creation of the Counterintelligence Department of the OGPU in the mid-1920s, 8 departments were formed in it. Two of them were headed by former agents of the Polish intelligence service (POV), who, after exposure, were admitted to the party and the OGPU at the insistence of Dzerzhinsky (4th department - Kiyakovsky-Stetskevich, 6th department - Sosnovsky-Dobrzhinsky). The other two departments were headed by former officers of the Austro-Hungarian army (7th department - Pataki, 8th department - Steinbrück). The 1st department was headed by a former PPS-Lewica militant (Formmeister), who in 1906 received 20 years in hard labor for robbing and murdering a pregnant woman. At the head of the 5th department was a man about whom no one knows anything, the 3rd department was led by a young protégé of Dzerzhinsky (Olsky-Kulikovsky). And only the 2nd department was headed by the boring Estonian communist Käspert, about whom there is nothing to tell.
The average SS dude was a Finnish dude fighting to take back Karelia from the Russians or a French conservative fighting against communism.
Only 40% of the SS were even Germans
Thank you from the heart for reminding the western audiences about the Katyń forest Massacre.
I hope to see a special episode about creating the Polish Army in USSR, Sikorski-Majski agreement, or exodus of Gen. Anders' Army from USSR to Iran, Middle East, Egypt, Libya and finally Italy. Keep up the great work!
Never forget - Always remember
With all of what happened before '39, it's still hard to imagine Stalin would be so cruel as to give up fellow communists. This is the sort of stuff that makes Lenin's cruelty seem like kid's play... he was a monster, but Stalin was the monster monsters have nightmares about.
Savage. Thats what I think when the NKVD is mentioned. Dog eat dog, stab in the back, murder at will... Even Shakespeare couldnt have dreamed these guys up.
Perhaps someday you will try to study history not from the side that your government and similar custom videos are presenting to you, but on the other, you will study the sources, REAL facts and you will be able to come to some conclusions yourself
"Well, tovarisch, it's you today, and me tomorrow..."
Shakespeare would have been committed.
@@user-mr1yb9qk4y I might say the very same thing to you! ;-) I just dont recall the FBI rounding up people and shooting them because they MIGHT pose a threat.
@@billd.iniowa2263 WACO
NKVD: Taking state within a state to the next level
Good video. I have to point out that Kirov wasn't just the "chief of Leningrad", he was the vicepresident at the time.
He wasn't vice president. He was second General Secretary of the Party.
There is evidence he was plotting against Stalin. Can't blame him but old Joe wasn't someone you wanted as a rival.
@@dongately2817 Actually he was killed during a passional dispute...
I would argue that if Stalin is the prototype of Big Brother from "1984", than Yagoda's face inspired Orwell for the rat - Winston's atavistic fear...
Actually Orwell’s book Animal Farm is based on Stalin, with the pigs in the end becoming the leaders of the farm.
Trotzki is Emmanuel Goldstein.
@@Marinealver
George Orwell, The Face Of Greatness.
The NKVD, where the origin of "Go to Gulag" started...
The concept of sending people to exile in Siberia was actually a long tradition in the Russian empire, but the communists made it more deadly
Gulags were are located not only Siberia, but everywhere around the country
'Do not pass "Go", do not collect 200 rubles.'
that comment will also make you go to Gulag,comrade
Thank you for covering this. This is an often overlooked part of history.
Believe that these egregious events are known in many countries and not forgotten.
The first time that I heard NKVD when I played the very first Call of Duty in 2003. When playing as Alexei Voronin, they are storming a tank factory in Poland and you will hear two soldiers talking about NKVD.
This is how Western people are fooled: first in games, then in custom-made books without sources of information, then in government-sponsored videos. It's sad that you and millions like you are so easily misinformed
@@user-mr1yb9qk4y What problem do you have with the video lol
Thank you guys for providing a completely unbiased and historically accurate view of past events it really helps educate those who weren't there
The American View Cannot Be Historically Accurate NEVER, take it as an axiom
I wouldnt be so sure. It is purely western point of view - "bolsheviks are evil". There are a lot of practical mistakes as well - like Menzhynsky didnt die from "mysterious circumstances", he was severely ill for decades and so forth. It would be musch better to invite a russian historian, who would tell the narrative based on actual sourses (which are plenty in archives) and not solely on western point of view.
@@user-mr1yb9qk4y Ok Ivan, stop trying to white-wash these fucking criminals.
Seems like "dying under mysterious circumstances" has been so very popular in Russia under the Tzars, then for 70 years under the Bolsheviks, and now for the last 30 years under Vlad And Friends. All so mysterious. And popular.
"Yagoda" literally means "a strawberry". How sweet... On the other hand "Yezhov" means "a hedgehog".
What about Lavrentiy?
Not exactly, "yagoda" means just a "berry". "Strawberry" is the meaning of "клубника".
Strawberry fields of hedgehogs
that would be correct if the accent would fall on the first "A". However his family name is of Jewish origin. Yagòda is a russification of the Hebrew name Yehuda, or Judah
@@ivarkich1543 Sorry! I guessed it's the same as in Bulgarian!
At Nuremberg the Soviet Union tried to put the blame on Germany for the Katyn massacre.
There's no proof that the USSR did the katyn massacre
@@zeckiel6109 had proof read the documents and USSR admitted it. I am a person who has seen the archives of Soviet documents. My father worked in the KGB. Now the FSB. And NKVD officers killed children, old people and women. All these crimes have been declassified and almost half of them can be obtained from the public domain if you are Russian-speaking
@@tacerepace7868 ''Katyn ??? What Katyn ??? There is no Katyn but Khatyn !!!''
For years, Katyn, Bielorussia was buried under Khatyn, Ukraina an admittedly nazi crime like Babi Yar.
@@Charlesputnam-bn9zy The Polish POW-s were murdered at Katyn, Russia. As in, the area belonged to the Russian republic even in the times of the USSR. The Khatyn village cemetery that pays homage to the victims of Nazi terror is in Belarus, nowhere near the border of Ukraine. You got it all messed up.
@@yarpen26
That's the spirit of sarcasm, like :
'' Mafia, mafia, mafia !!!
'' What mafia ???
'' There is no mafia !!!
'' And we kill anyone who says there is a mafia !!!''
Signed : The Mafia.
I just realized that I’d love to see Spartacus cosplay as Adam Savage and Indy cosplay Jamie Hyneman. Sparty is already half 3/4 of the way there, we just need to make his hair a little more Einsteiny. It’d be hilarious to see Indy in a walrus mustache and beret!
They're busting myths already, so you're onto something there!
YES! PLEASE.
I’m reading now a book called Man is Wolf to Man surviving Stalin’s Gulag by Janusz Bardach .
Bardach was a Polish Jewish student conscripted into the Red Army in 1939. He soon afterwards is sent to various Soviet prison camps in Siberia. This story is amazing how he could survive. He talks about the horrors and power the NKVD enforce over the prisoners.
A couple of really nice elements to this tie, but compared to some of the absolute gems we've seen thus year, this yellow effort falls just a little short. You keep raising the expectations!! 2.5/5
Fashion, the least interesting subject of history
OTOH, this characteristics of this subject matter are more of a continuous grinding, unfolding which is different from sharply defined, dramatic events of WW2. The major networks or documentarians only publish exciting, sharp events that capture attention.
@@yourstruly4817 I was of the same opinion, but tbh I found some interesting links between military history and men's fashion.
Why in the hell do you value the superfluous so very much?
You are on quite possibly the most serious and credible historic journalistic archive on the internet, and all you have to offer is fashion critiques?
Also, and I've felt this for a long time now, it is just plain super weird of you you to ignore the entire vast human cataclysm of the content discussed, to focus on the detail of the presenter's wardrobe.
Just super fucking weird man...
How many dead bodies came across your screen? Your takeaway was a gold tie? That's a deep seated mental aberration you must be wrestling with on a daily basis. How do you even have normal human interactions in public with a predisposition that lends itself so repeatedly towards highlighting the inane and absurdly awkward?
@@BeingFireRetardant My understanding is that TimeGhost really values his little asides, bit of a morale boost after discussing such tragedy.
The servicemen of the NKVD troops showed unparalleled resilience in all the hardest battles and battles: in the defense of the Brest Fortress, Riga, Tallinn, Mogilev, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Tula, in the Moscow and Stalingrad battles, in the battles in the Caucasus and the Kursk Bulge. In total, military units of 58 divisions and 23 separate brigades of the NKVD troops participated in battles of varying duration. The soldiers of the 132nd separate battalion of the NKVD troops located in the Brest fortress fought to the last bullet. On the walls of the battalion's barracks, the famous inscription remained: “I am dying, but I am not surrendering. Goodbye, Motherland. 20.VII.41 ". The garrisons of the 9th and 10th divisions of the NKVD troops for the protection of railway structures, guarding transport communications on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, even when surrounded in the deep rear of the enemy, continued to defend objects for a long time until the last soldier. More than 70% of the soldiers and officers of these formations remained missing, but they did their duty to the end. In the battles for Leningrad, five divisions and two brigades of the NKVD troops distinguished themselves. So, the 21st Rifle Division of the NKVD troops of Colonel M.D. Papchenko defended the southern approaches to the city and subsequently, thanks to the courage of the soldiers of the division, became the 109th Red Banner Leningrad. 1st Rifle Division of Colonel S.I. Donskoy for special distinction became the 46th Luga Order of Suvorov, 2nd degree. 20th Rifle Division of Colonel A.P. Ivanova acted on the famous "Nevsky Pyatachok", lost more than half of its personnel, but did not retreat. Airborne troops were sent from the division to the rear of the enemy, which, according to the recall of Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov, "they showed miracles of courage everywhere."
It is a shame that such courageous actions were overshadowed by a long history of heinous crimes.
I specially wrote this for those whose ideas about Russia are at the level of "vodka-balalaika".
What you say is true...just like the waffen ss fought bravely until the end....the criminality of the organization overshadows the bravery of it's troops.
@@Oszczywilski "but muh SS and NKVD are the same"
give it a rest.
The U.S. Air Force fought bravely, but their bravery was overshadowed by the mass and deliberate killing of civilians - the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Amazing work as always!
1:49- Behind Yagoda is little Nikita K.
Man, Sparty is getting better and better at this. Awesome work guys!
How about the NKVD being placed behind attacking troops to stop them from retreating
The NKVD first job as blocking detachments was to send the soldiers back to the front lines. If that was not possible to round them up and decide whether they would go back to the front or put them in penal battalions. Sometimes they were put on trial and sent to the Gulag or shot in what they considered cowardly behavior.
That's true, but they would very rarely shoot them. And unlike in enemy at the gates they weren't after the soldiers who retreated after a failed attack but after the ones who tried to run from the front.
The USSR had a mostly conscript army and many men just can't handle war even if they love their country. Stalin and his NKVD knew that if left unregulated they'd have a large numbers of men fleeing the battlefield and as Stalin put it "The panic mongerer cowards also cause good soldiers to also retreat in a panic". Can't believe I'm quoting Stalin.
In fact I don't reccal hearing of a single instance of blocking units shooting fleeing men. I mean I'm sure it did happen but it was far from the norm.
The soldiers were mostly detained and based on the severity of their subordonance they were either sent back to their units, demoted in rank and then sent back or sent to penal battalions.
There were also many who got executed but that's a fraction of a fraction of those detained.
Officers caught were the ones suffering the harshest reprisals and they make a disproportionatelly large number of those executed.
Edit: You have to understand that the Red Army in the first year or so of the war struggled to form a frontline, their divisions got surrounded and destroyed on a daily basis, units fell back without authorisation and left gaps in the line and noone wanted to be left behind and taken by the germans so a lot of men just ran away as soon as they thought the front was going to move east.
To the Stavka this was not acceptable and understandably so.
Thanks for the video
8:50 when the mass murderers discover your mass graves and think you a barbarian
NKVD: You’re not tied to a chair, this fight isn’t fair
NKVD had combat units that were at front lines in the Great Patriotic War.
NKVD had it's role as Stalin main enforcer against "internal enemies" which weren't given chance to defend them self, but most of them were just regular police. 10th Rifle Division of NKVD fought in Staligrand until only 200 of original 7500 men were left standing
@@thechekist2044 At the front lines, in back of the troops actually fighting.
Thats like calling the SS Einsatzgruppen as being at the "front lines"
Maybe they invented Putin's specially of launching oneself out the upstairs window of a hotel.
Great voice. Well written, researched, and looks completely spontaneous. Bravo!
Great work, Spartacus, Time Ghost Army, et al
Amazing any Poles survived being trapped between the Soviets and the Nazis. History still seems to hang like a dark cloud over Poland when I went there a couple years ago.
Yes 20% of the prewar population was killed. Six million out of 20 million.
@@caryblack5985 from the top of my head: it was actually 6 million out of ~35. Half of them were Jewish half of them Polish. Around 1970-80s we reach the 35 million population again (but please be aware that borders has changed and current territory is smaller than pre-war). It might be a good question to OOTF: "Did Jews consider themselves as Poles (French, German, etc.) with different faith or as Jews". I read recently labour camp memories from of one Jew (pre-war Polish citizen), who was thinking in the camp of how post-war would look like and how he would participate in rebuilding Poland. Eventually he moved to Israel.
@@arti8719 Well thats an interesting question. You have to look at it from both sides. There were some antisemitic Poles who considered Jews as aliens in their land. I am sure that some Jews also thought of their community as more of their identity than their Polish citizenship, How many Jews considered themselves Polish and how many Poles identified the Jews as countrymen is something that I couldn't confidently answer.
@@caryblack5985 30%
@@caryblack5985
Yes, unfortunately.
When the reds entered Poland in 1939 many Polish-Jewish reds denounced the anti-red Poles to the soviets.
And when the nazis came in '41 the Poles took revenge, although both suffered under the same bloodthirsty yoke.
The Polish Resistance Army Of The Interior(AK) before the Warsaw Insurrection, sometimes conducted pogroms of its own.
Yet, during the Warsaw Ghetto slaughter in 1943, the AK provided weapons for the Jewish fighters.
And in 1946, there was another pogrom in Poland...
Greatest CZcams channel ever!
you and your buddy sure turn out some great content...as i mentioned to him it should be available as part of the school curriculum here in UK. it would have saved me having to watch all them war movies in the 70s 80s that turned out to be just wrong...thank you for the clarity and the easy conveyance of this subject matter.....thank you
Excellent.You are such a good teacher.Greetings from Greece.
No mention of Dzerzhinsky!? He basically built the Cheka and was immensely popular both within the system and generally - he was one of the few men that could standup to Stalin and one of even fewer that could have (potentially) challenged his power!
Dzherzhinsky was actually very moderate and was against most Red terror methods. He also built hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Civil War. He is still very popular in Russia.
@Bogdan Radu Felix Dzherzhinsky was not a monster. He was against most red Red Terror methods and only was in favour of executions of white Army officers only as a defensive mean. After the war Dzherzhinsky opened hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Russian Civil War by cutting 20% of the paychecks of the Cheka operatives. Whether the children were from the Reds or the Whites it didn't matter. Dzherzhinsky is still respected in Russia by Communists and anti-communists alike. Was the man a monster because he tried to protect the revolution and his comrades from counter revolutionaries that would've murdered them if he didn't? You know how a war works right?
@Bogdan Radu what an asinine comment. As though the people of Russia themselves had no agency!
After All it was Lenin who recognised, alone amongst his revolutionary peers, that a revolution had already taken place! That peasants *had* expropriated land and portioned it communally across the empire, that workers and soldiers had already formed Soviets and ceased to follow orders from their de jure leaders.
This infantile notion of history as 'good' and 'bad' tells us nothing and completely fails to recognise any lived reality of the time.
@Bogdan Radu 1. Before Hitler came to power Soviet - German relations were just fine
2. So it went from 4th to 2nd in the world and that is bad ?
3. WTF ??
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Growth_of_Russia_1547-1725_true_borders.png
@Bogdan Radu This is a particularly weird type of sophistry you're engaging in sir, put on your blog or something.
Nice to see a video on Stalin's personal hit squad. Great job.
We find bright spots where we can - I heard "manifold" as" manyful" and enjoyed that newly minted word very much!
A good video Spartacus I liked it.
Good episode. Nice link to future events like Anders Army and Germans discovering Katyn graves and starting to cover their own atrocities by burning bodies.
Thank you fo bringing the Katyn masacre topic. For many years in cointires in soviet block the talking about this was prohibitet. Soviets also puts a lot of misinformation about this. Thanks once more
Excellent video.
Thanks!
NKVD be like: "You know you're life is pretty much done when the Big Boss lights up his smoking pipe and says "Send him east" while pointing out your ass" x.X
Do organizations like this naturally attract paranoid sociopaths, or does it turn almost every member into one? Many groups issue a list of employees who are retiring or have transferred elsewhere. The NKVD sent out a monthly list of funeral notices with the list of promotions stapled to it.
When you do something to other people, its very easy to project and start thinking other people want to do the same to you. This is why you have the silly "white genocide" spouted by white supremacists.
So if you spy and kill your political opponents NKVD style, after a few nights you are going to have some trouble sleeping.
Google Salomon Morel if you want wiki read about typical NKVD officer.
Yagoda just looks like a comic book villain
It's just crazy the amount of photos there are compared to that of the Holocaust.
Describing the NKVD as bloodstained bureaucrats only becomes more fitting when you look at some of the anecdotes about them. Like executioners having to use german pistols when they purged soviet occupied poland from reserve officers because firing that number of bullets from a TT or nagant put too mutch stress on their wrists. It´s the equivalent of getting yourself an ergonomical mouse for your desk job. But with more dead poles.
I knew a man that survived the Soviets and Germans in Poland.
I knew a woman that survived both the Soviets and Nazi's in Poland, Krakow 🙏
Most did survive.
Although it is outside of the timeframe you're looking at, I'm surprised you didn't end by talking about what the NKVD gets renamed into in the 1950s--the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, more popularly known as the KGB.
Yes, there were cases, often in the special forces were just guys 18 years old. They gave me a light.
Great work, now let's try to put all that aside, Merry Christmas to all ! (or happy holidays)
Do a special on the Kenpeitai!
How so many people stood by and let Stalin take control is just beyond me.
At the time, he seemed like a moderate. By the time things looked bad, it was basically too late.
The true story of soviet and Stalin will probably never be known. Im guessing it's somewhere between the wests demonization & writing of history, and the die-hards idolization and stubborn worshipping of Stalin.
The biggest problem about Romanovs were their leadership and not hunting down bolsheviks and mensheviks after 1905.
Doing a coup against Stalin was extremely hard after all
"the NKVD's tentacles..."
My reaction was literally an enthusisatic "oooooh" and then "wait no, the NKVD is bad"
I find it amusing how Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, the troika of State Security each had a falling-out with their bosses, were purged, and all died sobbing and begging for their lives. These men were all pleading, mewling cowards who displayed not a shred of dignity when faced with their own deaths.
Tyrants often are the weakest of men when stripped of power.
-TimeGhost Ambassador
Hi there, i just started watching the episode and it seems like there is a mismatch in the subtitles at the start. at 1:26 the Subtitles state "in 1934, the NKVD sees a change of leadership" while Spartacus says "When Genrikh Yagoda rises to control the umbrella of the organization". After that the subtitles goes on t "Genrikh Yagoda has already been active with the OGPU Secret services before, where he was on of the founders of a poison factory. Well, using the techniques developed there Yagoda slowly poisoned his boss...." This is not what Spartacus is saying. Im guessing that there is a mismatch in the scripts but it really threw me for a loop XD
Been fixed - that was the non-fact checked earlier version - sorry about that.
@@WorldWarTwo No worries, it just confused me for a second :) Thanks for fixing it so quickly!
A good friend of mine (sadly gone from us) from Estonia told me that during the fall of Tallinn in 1941 and the failed attempt of the Soviets to pull off a Russian Dunkirk, the special targets for Estonians were striped shirts (Naval Infantry) and green hats (NKVD). No mercy.
I get the NKVD, but why the marines?
Well the soviets won anyway, so what did that no mercy of yours get you?
@@invisigaming357 as if in 1941 you knew what would happen in the future. You sure knew what was going on in the present.
@@thesayxx Naval Infantry were used for population suppression.
Excellent video. You should make a video about Cheka, Lavrentiy Beriya and SMERSH
Hey guys was wondering if in the future you’d be able to provide information for students to reference you, I’ve referenced the Great War in the past but I’m not sure if it was 100% correct. Thanks a lot
6:38 A man has fallen into the river of Lego City!
Dying under "mysterious circumstances" seems to be a reoccurring trend in the Soviet Union....
And in Putin's Russia
today they fall out of windows of very tall buildings
The Clintons: “Write that down! Write that down!”
These guys were every bit as ruthless as the Gestspo and SS.
These guys we're just crocodiles in human form. The most evil acting men in history I've ever read of.
Interesting. I hope you guys can do a video about food one day about the different rations the soldiers were eating
Should probably get a collaboration with Steve1989MRE on this. Nice!
There is a out of the foxholes one for food on american, british, italian, german, french, russian/soviet, chinese and japanese rations
Plus what the common citizen got on the home front, rationing was brutal. Merry Christmas.
My great aunts family was deported to Siberia by NKVD.
Did any of them made it back?
My grandfather was arrested and his wife and three small children were deported to Kazakhstan; all of them miraculously survived and come back home (which is now Belarus, not far from Nesvizh)
@@Darwinek My great aunt came back. But she could only be in Estonia (her home) for a year then her neighbor gave out her and the NKVD sent her back. Miraculously she survived the second time too.
I wish I had Sparty's style man that suit and gold tie are poppin
Leonardo Conti the Reich Health Leader and the head commissioner on Katyn investigation died suddenly while in British custody .
he refused to sign confession taking the blame for the massacre .
it's sad to see that Russia still employs these tactics as there was never any Nuremburg for the Soviet war of agresion and crimes against humanity
How does Russia continue to use these tactics? Can you give examples?
An nkfd special not apart of the war against humanity series? Seems they'd fit in..
Yagoda's portrait reminds me a lot of the Big Brother posters from 1984. Was his likeness used intentionally by Orwell or is this a grim coincidence?
Cool threads Sparty!
Looking flash Sparty.
Great episode. I know terrible the nazi participation in the Holocaust was but it always bothered me how little mention of the soviets there usually is, even when the reds get a cursory mention it usually gets pushed aside and forgotten while whole libraries are written up over the nazi horrors. Part of this comes from the very real fact that there is little written or photographic record in existance due to the difference in attitude between the communists and the nazis. The nazis took pride in their butchery while the reds were very thorough in wiping out any evidence of their crimes. Decades after the events there is still piles of nazi records to sort through while the communists made sure little could be traced back to them. The evidence that has been uncovered is all partially anecdotal. Something in the range of twenty to forty million dead can be attributed to Stalin and his henchmen. After they seized what would become eastern europe millions were taken away and sent to the labor camps and gulags from where few ever survived. German pows were worked to death and even german civilians were killed or allowed to starve in the millions many as the result of polish, czech hungarian etc efforts at retaliation all under the watchful eye of the red authorities. Today some soviet era records have been released but only in tiny driblets. We may never know the full extent of the communist Holocaust. Another factor that makes it difficult to uncover the truth is the fact that while the nazis worked under a fanatical racial agenda the soviets did not or at least not to the same level. The apparent glee with which the nazis carried out their efforts at extermination are lacking on the soviet side. Also I leave this bit for last because it has been known to produce an angry response, but it is still part of the historical record, ever since the advent of electronic media just over 100 years ago for one reason or another movie studios, radio and newspapers and finally TV all saw a large proportion of their ownership fall under control of a jewish element, not from any Zionist conspiracy but simply good business practice. During the war allied governments used the media to produce film, radio and print anti fascist propaganda. Because the soviets were our allies any evidence of atrocity perpetrated by them was covered up, then after the war the cold war shifted some of the thinking in the west but by then the discovery of death camps by allied troops helped create even more anti nazi fervor. It was considered to be too provocative in the growing cold war to mention soviet crimes. In the meantime as part of a real effort to drum up support for a jewish home in the middle east a vast amount of literature, films and television was focused on the Holocaust. There just wasn't room for a discussion on the soviet crimes. They were buried once more. Today very little is left, and to be honest it is possible the soviet crimes were not as great as that of the nazis but it is not really right to try and rate who was the worse? That makes a game out of horrible subject, but as a historian I hate to see the crimes of the reds to be brushed aside once more. It is great to find programs such as yours and i will just conclude by saying keep up the good work
"Не ищи черную кошку в темной комнате"
И не сравнивай НКВД и СС
Tbh this Yagoda's photo makes him look quite similar to the Big Brother
(In the last year, to the question "who is the best leader of Russia"? Stalin was named by 55-60% of respondents)
when you own the Trotskyites epic style
:(
@@leant6487 long live the tankie
Reject Trotskyism, return to tankie
(Free T-34 85 and BT-5 tenks guaranteed)
Based NKVD
GAMER YAGODA
BOTTOM TEXT
Every time I hear about the NKVD I think of the death of Stalin movie lolol
With Michael Palin as Molotov 😂
Go and kill them.
Despite whatever historical errors there might be in that film, watch Zhukov punch Beria square in the face in the "coup" scene was incredibly satisfying.
Sir......that suit!! wow!
Why does the English subtitles say that Yagoda poisoned Vyacheslav slowly to death, while Spartacus says that Vyacheslav died of mysterious circumstances? Later on in the video the subtitles doesn't match up either(Yezhov part). Weird.
Which one is correct? Anyway, great episode:)
We initially had the draft version of the script as subs, the one that had not yet been fact checked - it’s been fixed.
From pen pusher to killer....that would apply to Stalin. Stalin was appointed as Party Chairman under Lenin's govt because it was thought that was just a paper pushing job
How wrong they were.
He was a literal bandit robbing to fund revolution before that
One NKVD officer, Vasily Blokhin is said to likely be the individual who personally killed the most people in history, having executed tens of thousands during his decades-long career, including about 7 000 of the victims of the Katyn massacre. Eventually, he killed himself, after suffering from alcoholism and other mental problems in his retirement.
Indeed, look here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin
You could say he died doing what he loved.
man, life could be hell those days
Hard to believe, that this happened just one life ago