NKVD National Operations and Institutional Russification (1937–1939)

The conduct of secret mass "national operations" of the NKVD for the physical annihilation of members of ethnic minorities^[6]. The mechanism was set by the operational orders of people's commissar Yezhov: No. 00485 of 11 August 1937 opened the Polish operation - "to begin, from 20 August 1937, a broad operation aimed at the complete liquidation of the local organizations of the 'POW'" with completion "within a three-month term"^[7], - and No. 00439 of 25 July 1937 the German one^[8]; the Greek, Bulgarian and other operations followed their template^[6]. The scale is recorded in the perpetrator's own accounting: according to the summary figures of the 1st Special Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR dated 30 August 1938, 94,659 people were arrested in the republic under orders Nos. 00485, 00593 and others (54,011 on the Polish line, 23,036 on the German, 5,642 on the Greek), of whom 61,683 had been convicted by 1 July 1938; in all, of the 197,945 people convicted by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR over the reporting period, 122,274 were sentenced to be shot - nearly two out of every three^[9]. Across all the "national lines" of the USSR, 335,513 people were convicted, and 73.66% of them were shot^[10].

The forcible closure of all national councils, pedagogical institutes, theaters and cultural institutions of ethnic minorities in the Ukrainian SSR^[5]: the national districts and village soviets were liquidated by the resolution of the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 24 January 1938^[2], and the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U of 10 April 1938 reorganized the national schools and colleges and turned the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute into an institute of foreign languages^[4].

On 24 January 1938 the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), by its resolution "On the Liquidation of National Schools and National Sections in Schools," closed non-Russian schools throughout the Union, liquidating the national districts and village soviets on the same day^[1][2]; on 13 March the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the USSR Council of People's Commissars No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" made the metropole's language a compulsory subject in all schools of the republics^[3]. Kyiv executed the decision on 10 April 1938: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, "proceeding from the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)," declared "the further existence of special national schools inexpedient and harmful" and resolved to reorganize the German, Polish, Czech, Swedish and other schools and technical colleges "into Soviet schools of the ordinary type," to liquidate national sections and classes at ordinary schools, colleges and universities, and, where there was nowhere to transfer the pupils, to transfer the institutions themselves to ordinary school curricula - "with instruction in Ukrainian or Russian"; the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute was turned into an institute of foreign languages, and all the work was ordered finished by 1 August 1938^[4]. The Politburo wrote its justification into the resolution itself: "enemies of the people - Trotskyites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists operating in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR - implanted special national German, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Greek and other schools, turning them into hotbeds of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on children"^[4]. The decision was given the form of a state act by the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in its resolution of 29 June 1938 on the reorganization of special national schools, colleges and the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute: by 1 August 1938, 766 national primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools were subject to reorganization into ordinary schools with (predominantly) Russian and Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and another 122 were merged with Russian and Ukrainian ones on the territorial principle - the count of the historian Liudmyla Yakubova^[11].