Stalin set "mass operations” in motion with a top secret telegram of July 3, 1937, which ordered sixty-five regions, within five days, to prepare lists of enemies "to be shot” and to staff extra-judicial tribunals (called troikas) for expeditious sentencing.8 Orders from Stalin or the Politburo were top secret; they could not be shared with others. It was up to the executing agency, in this case Ezhov's NKVD, to issue detailed instructions to those on the ground. Ezhov's Operational Decree of the NKVD No. 00447, issued on July 30, 1937, told the executors what was expected of them.
Mass operations of such magnitude, conducted in sixty-five regions in the world's largest country according to land mass, had to be explained in clear and exacting terms. Each of the sixty-five administrative regions had to know when to start, how many to execute or imprison, how to prepare the paperwork, and who was to carry out the sentence.
Stalin's July 3, 1937, directive gave only the basic outline: Enemies were to be divided into two categories: one to be executed, the other to be sent to remote areas; enemies were labeled with the catch-all phrase "returning kulaks [the term used to describe more prosperous peasants] and criminals.” In the almost four weeks between Stalin's telegram and Directive 00447, Ezhov held conferences in Moscow with regional NKVD leaders and met fifteen times with Stalin (often with the indispensable Molotov in attendance) in meetings sometimes lasting more than three hours.
Ezhov had only an elementary education; his drafting skills were weak. The decree was written by his deputy M. P. Frinovskii, whom Ezhov placed in charge of overall operations. Stalin knew and approved its contents. Upon receipt of the Frinovskii draft, Stalin instructed his personal secretary: "I am sending you Operational Decree No. 00447. I request you send this to members of the Politburo for voting and send the results to Comrade Ezhov.”9 The result of the vote was preordained; no Politburo member would dare oppose Stalin on such an issue.
Initially, the regions were told they had five days to prepare lists of victims; so their activity was frantic. Ezhov's NKVD had extensive card catalogs of citizens (internal passport records, criminal records, those expelled from the party, and records of disenfranchised persons) from which centralized lists could be compiled. The regional party and NKVD departments also had extensive regional records from local surveillance, factory lists, and local prosecutors. Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev officials even kept lists of relatives of those expelled from the party and of former oppositionists.
The decree itself was a classic Soviet "extraordinary decree” that set aside existing legal codes for a designated period of time—a sort of declaration of martial law—and put in place new rules that were to guide the terror campaign from start to finish.
Ezhov's Operational Decree No. 00447 is a document that can largely tell its own story in its own words.