The cases for OSO meetings were prepared not only by the central NKVD in Moscow, but also sent to Moscow by the NKVD heads (commissars) of the republics, heads of regional UNKVD branches and heads of military district OOs. The decisions were short and were typed on a special form. Here, in the original formatting, is an example of a decision from the Archival Investigation File of the American Communist Isai (Isaiah) Oggins sentenced as a spy in 1940:
Heard: Case No. 85 of the GUGB Investigation Department of the NKVD, on the accusation of OGGINS Isai Samoilovich, b. 1898 in Massachusetts (USA), an American citizen.
Decided: To sentence OGGINS Isai Samoilovich to EIGHT-year imprisonment as a spy. The term begins from February 20, 1939 [the date of Oggins’s arrest]. The [Investigation] File is to be sent to the [NKVD] archive.
Head of the Secretariat of the Special Board under the People’s Internal Affairs Commissar.
In fact, since 1928 Oggins spied not against, but for the Soviets—at first for the Comintern (Communist International, the international organization of Communist parties with its headquarters in Moscow), then for NKVD foreign intelligence—in Europe, the United States, and China.38 As for Vladimir Ivanov, who signed the excerpt, he headed the OSO Secretariat of the NKVD/MVD from 1939 until 1946, the OSO Secretariat of the MGB in 1946–47, and then the OSO Secretariat of the new Beria’s MVD from July to November 1953.
A prison official announced the OSO decision to a prisoner while he was still in an investigation prison. The prisoner was obliged to sign a copy of the decision, but it made no difference if he refused to do so. Then the prisoner was transferred to a transit prison, and from there he was sent to a labor camp. As for death sentences, they were carried out within twenty-four hours, with the prisoner learning of his impending execution only a few minutes before it was to take place.
According to the MVD report to Nikita Khrushchev, dated December 1953, in 1940 the OSO convicted 42,912 people under Article 58, and during the war, this number varied.39 For comparison, numbers convicted of Article 58 crimes by the Military Collegium for the same years are given:
| Year | OSO | Military Collegium40 |
|---|---|---|
| 1941 | 26,534 | 28,732 |
| 1942 | 77,548 | 112,973 |
| 1943 | 25,134 | 95,802 |
| 1944 | 10,611 | 99,425 |
| 1945 | 14,652 | 135,056 |
| Total | 243,954 | 471,988 |
In fact, the number of the convicted by the OSO, especially during the war, might have been from two to three times higher. The other archival records show that in 1943 alone, SMERSH, NKGB, and NKVD submitted 51,396 cases to the OSO, and 681 of the accused were sentenced to death, while in 1944 the OSO convicted a total of 27,456 prisoners.41 For unknown reason the 1953 MVD report mentions only 10,611 convicted in 1944, and not 27,456. Similarly, the report gives the number 14,652 for 1945, while the historian Nikita Petrov gives the number 26,518 for that year.42
The following numbers, which are for 1945 only, illustrate the enormity of the persecution endured by the Russian populace:
899,613 defendants were sentenced by civilian courts and military tribunals
357,007 were sentenced by military tribunals only (of these, 134,956 were sentenced on counter revolutionary charges)
297 were sentenced by the Military Collegium
26,581 were sentenced by the OSO.43
Like the death sentences pronounced by the Military Collegium in closed sessions, the death sentences pronounced by the OSO remained a state secret. On September 29, 1945 Beria signed an instruction on how to answer inquiries regarding the whereabouts of those who had been convicted by the OSO to death and executed during the war. He ordered the continuation of claims that the prisoner ‘was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and deprivation of the right to write letters and receive parcels’.44
The OSO within the NKVD/MVD existed until July 1950. However, in November 1946 on Abakumov’s order a second OSO was created within the MGB, which considered political cases from 1947 to 1953.45 It was reorganized after Stalin’s death and finally disbanded in September 1953.
Nikolai Mesyatsev, who had legal training, wrote in 2005: ‘The Special Board… was a mockery of the natural right of every individual to openly defend his innocence and publicly participate in the procedure of establishing the extent of his guilt.’46 Archival materials of the OSO have never been declassified, and the lists of the names of the convicted and the number of sentenced chsiry and foreigners remains unknown. But even if the OSO records are eventually declassified, it will not be easy to examine them: recently all OSO records were moved from the FSB Central Archive in Moscow to its archival branch in the city of Omsk in Siberia.
Notes
1. Paragraph 2 in Part I of the TsIK Resolution, dated July 10, 1934. Document No. 124 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka (2003), 547–8.
2. A 25-year term of imprisonment was introduced by TsIK Resolution dated October 2, 1937. G. M. Ivanova, ‘Zakonodatel’naya baza sovetskoi repressivnoi politiki’, in Kniga dlya uchitelya: Istoriya politicheskikh repressii i soprotivleniya nesvobode v SSSR, edited by V. V. Shelokhaev, 39–82 (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 2002) (in Russian).
3. Beria’s report to Stalin, dated November 15, 1941, quoted in ibid., 56.
4. In addition to the Military Collegium, from 1923 to 1934, court sessions of three members of the OGPU Collegium that included high-level OGPU functionaries also handed down death sentences. The Collegium considered only important cases under Articles 58 and 59 in the absence of defendants whom it sentenced to long terms of imprisonment or to death. See http://www.memo.ru/memory/preface/martyr.htm (in Russian), retrieved September 4, 2011.
5. TsIK Resolution, dated September 14, 1937. Kniga dlya uchitelya, 70.
6. M. P. Charyev, ‘Deyatel’nost’ voennykh tribunalov vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941-1945 gg.,’ Voenno-yuridicheskii zhurnal, no. 8 (2006), 25–30 (in Russian). In 1941, there were 76 tribunals within the NKVD troops.
7. Biography of V. V. Ulrikh (1889–1951) in Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 52–55.