Gossudarstvennoe politichesky upravleniye

The Objedinjonnoje State Political Directorate ( Russian Объединённое государственное политическое управление : United State Political Administration , OGPU ), usually abbreviated to GPU , was the name of the secret police since 1922 the Soviet Union . In 1934 it was absorbed by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) . The GPU was the successor organization to the Cheka and a forerunner of the KGB .

General

The Cheka founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky on behalf of Lenin on December 20, 1917 was called the “Extraordinary All-Russian Commission to Combat Counterrevolution , Speculation and Sabotage ” and was used for mass shootings, arrests and torture of “ class enemies ” (political opponents, Mensheviks , social revolutionaries , bourgeoisie) Democrats, clerics, Cossacks ) as well as for the implementation of deportations to " betterment camps ".

On February 8, 1922, the Cheka was converted into a GPU, but the structure was not changed. Dzerzhinsky remained the head of the GPU - even under Stalin . After Dzerzhinski's death, WR Menschinsky took his place. As planned by the Cheka in 1921, the GPU set up a network of agents in Europe. With this, the chief of counterintelligence , Artur Artusow , and the head of the foreign intelligence service, Meir Trillisser , were supposed to crush the white emigration , especially the Russian All-Military Union led by General Kutepov .

Among other things, the GPU was responsible for uncovering so-called “pest activity” in Soviet companies and for implementing measures such as the forced collectivization of agriculture (1929–1933). Until the left opposition in the USSR was smashed, the GPU had no authority over the party or the state apparatus. Party members could only be prosecuted after they were expelled from the party. From September 1927 the GPU could also be active within the party and the state apparatus. Also from September 1927 the intensive build-up of GPU military units, which were supposed to control the army, began. The prisoners who were involved in their activities in large numbers were used for forced labor in GPU's own camps, including building the White Sea-Baltic Canal (from 1931) and sections of the Baikal-Amur Mainline .

In 1934 the OGPU went under GG Jagoda in the newly formed People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD). From 1936 to 1938 the NKVD carried out the “ Great Terror ”, during which real and alleged opponents of Stalin were executed en masse. In 1941 the actual secret police was separated from the NKVD under the name People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) - in 1946 it was renamed the Ministry for State Security (MGB). After the deaths of Stalin and Lavrenti Beria it became the Committee for State Security (KGB) in 1953/54 .

The Soviet secret services NKVD / MWD and Smersch had carried out mass arrests of dangerous Germans for the purpose of being sent to special camps in the Soviet Zone using secret order 00315 . In German usage, the services were generally called “GPU”. The name was popularized by the anti-Soviet film of the same name by Karl Ritter from 1942. The prisons set up by the Soviets in the basements of confiscated houses, villas, barracks and official buildings to accommodate the arrested were popularly known as “GPU basements”. The central point was the cellar prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , known as the "U-Boot" .

The abbreviation “GPU” was sarcastically resolved by the East German population as “ Grotewohl - Pieck - Ulbricht ” and as “Horror Panic Downfall”.

literature

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn : The Gulag Archipelago. An attempt at an artistic mastery . Scherz Verlag, Bern, 1973.
• Alexandra Anzerowa : From the land of the mute . Bergstadtverlag, Breslau, 1936.
• Viktor Kravchenko : I chose freedom . E. Kaiser, Klagenfurt, 1949.
• Ivan Solonevich : The lost . Essen, 1937.
• Jan Valtin : Diary of Hell . From the American by Werner Krauss. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
• Jonathan R. Adelman (Ed.): Terror and Communist Politics: The Role of the Secret Police in Communist States . Boulder, Co .: Westview Press 1984, ISBN 0-86531-293-1 .
• George Leggett : The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police . Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981, ISBN 0-19-822552-0 .

Web links

Commons : Joint State Political Directorate, USSR (OGPU)  - Collection of images

• History of the Soviet Secret Services 1917–1931 (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mikhail Kuzmich Ryklin : Life thrown into the fire - The generation of the Great October. A research. From the Russian by Sabine Grebing and Volker Weichsel, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, pp. 144 f.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Michal Reiman : The Birth of Stalinism , page 69f.
3. ↑ For the description and the following see Peter Erler : GPU-Keller. Detention centers and remand prisons of the Soviet secret services in Berlin (1945–1949), Bund der Stalinist Verfolten, Berlin 2005, p. 12, notes 2 and 3
4. ↑ Uwe Pries: As a Thälmann pioneer on you and you with "Iwan". When Europe lay in ruins in 1948, Detlev Crusius was six years old. By then he had already fled the Red Army for several months. Now he was splashing around in the lake with Russian soldiers and got a first-class haircut. November 18, 2008, archived from the original on January 9, 2010 ; Retrieved December 25, 2014 . 
5. ↑ 1945 distress. Archived from the original on September 24, 2008 ; Retrieved December 25, 2014 .