in the campaign “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[1]. 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"[2], - and No. 00439 of 25 July 1937 the German one[3]; the Greek, Bulgarian and other operations followed their template[1]. 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[4]. Across all the "national lines" of the USSR, 335,513 people were convicted, and 73.66% of them were shot[5].