Talk:Mass operations of the NKVD

Untitled

The second paragraph is awful English, it looks like a bad translation to me. Could someone change this asap. ~~anon~~

Stalin's Assassination

Seems irrelevant and fringe POV, notwithstanding typography. Should I just go ahead and delete? Red-Eyed Prophet (talk) 18:47, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

mostly ethnic Ukrainians killed

"mostly ethnic Ukrainians" - As far as I know the high death toll of Ukrainians was due to Holodomor, not due to NKVD killings. Please provide the quotation from the book cited, what exactly the author said about death toll of Ukrainians. - Altenmann >talk 17:45, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

It is your responsibility to educate yourself on the subject, not mine to educate you: if you want to discard a reference that has been seen as being valid by everyone else (including Wikipedia: check Collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and you will see it opens by explaining how dekulakization was one of the methods utilized to achieve this, and millions died in the Holodomor genocide, meaning the death toll for the NKVD Operation is of a different nature) then it should also be your prerogative to research the sources. I did read the book in question years back, but it is not reasonable to delete a valid source, from a respected historian, just because "as far as you know" it didn't happen that way. --Dynamo128 (talk) 18:59, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, per Wikipedia rules, the one who wants to add information to Wikipedia, must provide proof of it; see WP:BURDEN. As for "as far as you know", I know way more than you. I started countless articles about Soviet persecutions in Wikipedia, including this one, so please avoid personal attacks, this is also against Wikipedia rules. - Altenmann >talk 19:27, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Regarding "respected historian" - I have no doubts about the historian; I cited him himself elsewhere. I have serious doubts how wikipedians interpret information provided by him. And per wikipedia rules, I have all rights, when in doubt, to request a quotation from sources which are not readily available. - Altenmann >talk 19:27, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't add the information, I merely restored it, so I'm not sure how that's applicable. Anyways, I found the book I read in 2019. I'm not gonna read the whole thing again because it mentions the situation in Ukraine repeatedly, but I can cite this that I found within it:

In these years of the Popular Front, the Soviet killings and deportations went unnoticed in Europe. Insofar as the Great Terror was noticed at all, it was seen only as a matter of show trials and party and army purges. But these events, noticed by specialists and journalists at the time, were not the essence of the Great Terror. The kulak operations and the national operations were the essence of the Great Terror. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak and national orders accounted for 625,483. The kulak action and the national operations brought about more than nine tenths of the death sentences and three quarters of the Gulag sentences.41

The Great Terror was thus chiefly a kulak action, which struck most heavily in Soviet Ukraine, and a series of national actions, the most important of them the Polish, where again Soviet Ukraine was the region most affected. Of the 681,692 recorded death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine—and this figure does not include natives of Soviet Ukraine shot in the Gulag. Ukraine as a Soviet republic was overrepresented within the Soviet Union, and Poles were overrepresented within Soviet Ukraine.42

41 Khlevniuk, Gulag, 147. I am citing the figures in Binner, “S etoj,” 207. Martin gives 386,798 deaths under Order 00447; see “Origins,” 855.

42 Soviet Ukraine represented twenty-two percent of the population and saw twenty-seven percent of the convictions; see Gregory, Terror, 265. For the 123,421 death sentences, see Nikol’s’kyi, Represyvna, 402; at 340 are the national proportions of those arrested during 1937-1938 in Soviet Ukraine: Ukrainians 53.2 percent (78.2 percent of population), Russians 7.7 percent (11.3 percent of population), Jews 2.6 percent (5.2 percent of population), Poles 18.9 percent (1.5 percent of population), and Germans 10.2 percent (1.4 percent of population).

There's likely much more, but in light of this, and in light of Soviet persecution which, if you are as familiar with it as you claim, you would know very deliberately and frequently target Ukrainians just for being Ukrainians, I see no reason to remove the claim. Also, I have no intention of doing personal attacks, but let's not forget that this whole discussion started because you lied about not removing information when you actually did (and that was after being called out on it - the first time you didn't provide an edit summary at all and seemingly tried to mask it by just reordering the page). So forgive me for being a little hesitant in light of all that. --Dynamo128 (talk) 20:05, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

(1) I asked you a specific question about specific source sited. You didnt answer. (2) I didnt "lie". I simply didnt pay attention to my valid removal of an unreferenced statement added by banned user]. You, on the other hand, moved the footnote without really consulting the source. (3) All stuff you quoted above didn't state that victims of dekulakization were mostly Ukrainians, just the opposite. YOur quote says: " Of the 681,692 recorded death sentences in the Great Terror, 123,421 were carried out in Soviet Ukraine" - far from being "mostly ethnic Ukrainians". Also, "arrested during 1937-1938 in Soviet Ukraine: Ukrainians 53.2 percent (78.2 percent of population)", meaning the percentage of arrested was significantly less than the percentage in the total population. Conclusion: you didn't prove the contested sentence. Please don't add any further walls of text; just provide the citation which specifically says that of killed during dekulakization mostly were ethnic Ukrainians, and we are done. - Altenmann >talk 21:29, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

P.S. your quoted text does give a good point that the main focus of most depictions of Great Terror were political show trials, as the lede says " Joseph Stalin's campaign to consolidate his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" , which were a minuscule fraction of deaths compared to mass operations of NKVD. In this respect the lede of "Great Purge" does poor job and must be improved. - Altenmann >talk 21:39, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

We are not done indeed, because you continue to lie. I pointed out in the edit summary what part of the text you removed, and then responding to that you said that you didn't remove anything, but merely re-ordered it. Considering I pointed out specifically which part had been deleted, and you specifically denied it at first, only to now falsely claim you "didn't pay attention", this simply does not hold up to scrutiny. You could have gotten away with this if I hadn't specified what I was restoring at the time, but I did. As a matter of fact, you actually revealed your cards in that you have a problem with how "Wikipedians cite this historian", meaning its removal is not something you overlooked initially but something you very pointedly wanted to get rid of even without having consulted the source yourself (else why would you be asking me to quote it?) and just decided to do it in a sneaky way to avoid any kind of discussion about it. Well, that didn't quite work out as we're seeing here.

I have no clue how you could interpret the text I posted in the way you did. The text quite literally states that Soviet Ukraine was overrepresented in terms of victims, and then in turn the Polish minority was additionally overrepresented on top of that. Since you want me to post no more "walls of text", I can only suggest seeking out the source yourself and reading the book. I am left here thinking that if I could freely remove or criticize a sourced book just because I didn't read it and I'm unconvinced of its viability as a source, approximately 75% of Wikipedia sources could just be freely nuked overnight. Additionally, you seem to be quite intent on proving that Ukrainians were not singled out for persecution in these actions, even though when it comes to persecuting Ukrainians specifically in the Soviet Union, this was widespread and well documented, and the ones responsible for such actions were the NKVD in the first place. Again according to the book, (only posting it this time since it's not a wall of text): "three hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937-1938". I suppose we could then modify "mostly ethnic Ukrainians" into "mostly from Soviet Ukraine" as a compromise.

But if, after this post, we continue to stay at an impasse, then the only recourse we have is third-party arbitration. --Dynamo128 (talk) 09:34, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

EDIT: Forgive me for more walls of text, but I found another that may even be more relevant:

Soviet Ukraine, where “kulak resistance” had been widespread during collectivization, was a major center of the killing. Leplevskii expanded the framework of Order 00447 to include supposed Ukrainian nationalists, who since the famine had been treated as a threat to the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. Some 40,530 people in Soviet Ukraine were arrested on the charge of nationalism. In one variant, Ukrainians were arrested for supposedly having requested food aid from Germany in 1933. When the (already-twice-increased) quotas for Soviet Ukraine were fulfilled in December 1937, Leplevskii asked for more. In February 1938 Yezhov added 23,650 to the death quota for the republic. All in all, in 1937 and 1938, NKVD men shot 70,868 inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in the kulak operation. The ratio of shootings to other sentences was especially high in Soviet Ukraine during the year 1938. Between January and August, some 35,563 people were shot, as against only 830 sent to camps. The troika for the Stalino district, for example, met seven times between July and September 1938, and sentenced to death every single one of the 1,102 people accused. The troika in Voroshilovgrad, similarly, sentenced to death all 1,226 people whose cases it reviewed in September 1938.

On the events of December and February, see Nikol’skij, “Kulakenoperation,” 623; and Nikol’s’kyi, “Represyvna,” 100. On Leplevskii’s interpretations of the categories of Order 00447, see Šapoval, “Behandlung,” 339, 341. On the arrests of 40,530 people, see Nikol’s’kyi, “Represyvna,” 153. On the 23,650 people added to the death quota, see Šapoval, “Behandlung,” 343. For the figures 70,868 and 35,563 and 830, see Junge, Vertikal’ , 533. For the figures 1,102 and 1,226, see Nikol’skij, “Kulakenoperation,” 634-635.

This references the same order brought up in the article, and explains how Ukrainians were deliberately targeted for supposed nationalism. --Dynamo128 (talk) 09:37, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I asked you a specific question and you still didn't answer: please provide the reference which says that of killed during ani-Kulak operation of NKVD Ukrainians were the majority. And again your wall of text proves opposite: you cited "All in all, in 1937 and 1938, NKVD men shot 70,868 inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine in the kulak operation" - which is way far from being majority compared to the total number of ~386,798. - Altenmann >talk 15:28, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

What are the victims in the other SSRs, then? --Dynamo128 (talk) 16:35, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Irrelevant. Please provide the requested reference. - Altenmann >talk 18:44, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Romanian Operation of the NKVD

ruwiki contains the following info: "NKVD order of August 17, 1937: about "Romanian operation" regarding legal and illegal immigrants from Romania to Moldova and Ukraine. 8,292 persons prosecuted of which 5,439 shot." I made a quick search but found no reliable references: all of them seem to copy from ruwiki verbatim. I vaguely remember I saw something about this back in 2004 when I created this article, so I added a Romanian entry; probably it was somewhere in Memorial or Pavel Polian publications. - Altenmann >talk 18:43, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Iran and Afghan operations

Алекс Громов Иранская операция НКВД [1] [2] - Altenmann >talk 18:56, 20 March 2024 (UTC)