NKVD Order No. 001223

The NKVD Order No. 001223, also known as Об оперативных мерах против антисоветских и социально враждебных элементов, erroneously: О высылке антисоветских элементов из Литвы, Латвии и Эстонии, was an order signed by Lavrenti Beria on October 11, 1939. In fact, its title was "О введении единой системы оперативного учета антисоветских элементов, выявляемых агентурной разработкой", or translated as, e.g."On the Operative Accounting of Anti-Soviet and Socially Alien Elements"

For a long time the text of the order and its exact title were not available, and information about it is known from references (including date and number) in the subsequent orders of state security. Therefore it used to be confused with the so-called Serov Instructions of 1941. This confusion was noted, e.g. by Finnish historian Seppo Myllyniemi in 1979. In 2012 Russian historian Aleksandr Dyukov in his collection of documents, Накануне Холокоста. Фронт литовских активистов и советские репрессии в Литве, 1940 - 1941 гг. published the text of the Order No. 001223, among a large collections of other documents of the time. In the introduction, basing on the reading of the documents, he argues that the deportations were actually an indirect result of the sloppy work of NKVD, which could not counteract the Baltic anti-Soviet underground by ordinary, routine everyday work. Beria's Order 001223 was about the compilation of the list of anti-Soviet activists and was accompanied a detailed bureaucratic instruction how to carry out this accounting, signed by Начальник 1 Спецотдела НКВД СССР, Капитан государственной безопасности ПЕТРОВ.

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