On 30 July 1937, Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, signed Operational Order No. 00447, approved by the Politburo the following day. It was titled On the Repression of Former Kulaks, Criminals and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.
It was, in form, an administrative document with a table.
The order established target figures for each region of the Soviet Union, divided into two categories. First category meant execution. Second category meant eight to ten years in the camps. The initial totals were around seventy-six thousand for the first category and around a hundred and ninety-three thousand for the second, and regional NKVD chiefs were invited to apply for increases, which many did, and which were routinely granted.
Cases were processed by troikas — three-man panels, typically the regional NKVD chief, the party secretary and the prosecutor — which required no defense, no evidence in any meaningful sense, and no appeal. Sentences were passed at rates of dozens per hour.
The mass operations of 1937 and 1938 killed roughly seven hundred thousand people.
Two mechanisms make this worth studying as an instrument rather than as an atrocity.
The first is bureaucratic distance. Milgram's agentic state — in which a person acting under legitimate authority relocates responsibility upward and executes instructions as an instrument — is achieved here structurally, by turning killing into an output. The officer filling a quota is not choosing a victim. He is meeting a figure, on a schedule, against a target set elsewhere, and the moral question does not present itself in the form in which it could be refused. Several officials applied to raise their quotas, which is what happens when a task becomes a performance metric.
The second is unpredictability, and it operates on the population rather than on the officials. Because the quotas had to be filled, and because the categories were elastic — former kulaks, criminals, other anti-Soviet elements — arrest was substantially decoupled from behavior. Nothing a citizen did reliably raised or lowered their risk.
Research on fear learning, including Mineka's work, establishes that unpredictable aversive stimuli produce stronger, more generalized and more persistent anxiety than predictable ones. Predictable danger teaches avoidance. Unpredictable danger produces diffuse hypervigilance, and hypervigilance without an available avoidance behavior produces something else: people reach for the only control action available, which was denunciation.
Denouncing a neighbor was the one act that appeared to reduce personal risk, and it fed the quota. The system therefore generated its own inputs, which is why the terror expanded until it was stopped by decree in November 1938. Yezhov was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Obedience and Diffused Responsibility