Odessa and Odessa Oblast: Regional Specifics in the Context of Mass Repression
Regional distinctions in the conduct of mass operations by the NKVD over 1937 and 1938 were based on both underlying geographical and administrative factors particular to Soviet regions and the presence of various social and ethnic groups subject to punitive action by the organs of the security police.
Repression was more intense in industrial regions than in agricultural ones, as well as in border areas and in cities with important military-industrial factories. The intensity of repression also depended upon the presence of so-called special contingents (exiles in this case) and non-Russian ethnic groups, who supposedly played the role of a potential “fifth column.” When these factors were combined, arrests skyrocketed, as was the case in the city of Odessa and Odessa Oblast.4The total number of victims convicted in 1937 and 1938 in the course of NKVD operation 00447 in Odessa Oblast was 13,054 people, of whom 7,044 were sentenced to death.5 In 1938, the mass operations were extended; while operation 00447 was gradually reined in, the so-called national operations expanded dramatically. Altogether, Odessa Chekists arrested 7,192 people between 1 January and 1 August 1938. The total number of those sent to the camps and executed in Odessa Oblast in both operation 00447 and the national operations comprised no fewer than 20,000 people.
As was the case throughout the Soviet Union, the primary victims of the NKVD in Odessa Oblast were ordinary people. Nonetheless, the number of victims among Communists was also high. In a report presented to NKVD USSR on 7 January 1938, the head of the Odessa Oblast UNKVD, N. N. Fedorov, wrote that 562 members of the “right-Trotskyist underground” within the Communist Party had been arrested from June to December 1937, including the secretary of the Oblast Party Committee, E. I. Veger.6 The assault on the Odessa Party organization continued in 1938. From 1 January to 1 August, the Odessa Oblast UNKVD arrested 213 Trotskyites and rightists, 27 participants of a supposed military fascist conspiracy, 44 Mensheviks, 15 members of the Bund, 96 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), 29 anarchists, and 119 Zionists.7 The vast majority of these 543 persons were Communist Party members at the time of their arrest. Those who survived and were released from prison in 1939 subsequently played an important role in the campaign for the “restoration” of “socialist legality.”