Sham Trials

The instruction on mass searches, issued for the operation by the staff of the OGPU (the political police, a predecessor of today's FSB), establishes that until the end of the investigation the arrested are concentrated at the staffs of the OGPU district groups, and of what follows point 19 says: "The procedure for conducting the investigation and the further routing of the arrested is provided for in the regulations on the troikas for the extrajudicial examination of cases"^[1]. The "Main Tasks of the Special Operational Groups of the OGPU", approved by Yevdokimov, plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU for the krai, Uborevich, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and Volodin, member of the district's Revolutionary Military Council, include the same procedure directly in the list of tasks: "The removal of the counter-revolutionary, bandit and other criminal anti-Soviet element... the registration of the same, the conduct of the investigation and the extrajudicial examination of their cases and their transportation to the place of destination"^[1]. Through this procedure passed 183 of the more than three hundred arrested in the course of the operation - the investigation of their cases ended in extrajudicial shooting^[2]. The OGPU had received the right of extrajudicial reprisal a year earlier - by a secret resolution of the Presidium of the TsIK of 9 May 1924 (campaign C1176); the operation's instruction applied it to the arrested.