Order 00447 was a Soviet-style plan; only its product was not steel or trucks, but executions and prison terms. A plan is not a plan without plan targets, and, insofar as enemies of the Soviet state are distributed geographically, Operational Decree No. 00447 assigned execution and imprisonment targets—called "limits”—on a regional basis. Each of the sixty-five regions was assigned "limits” for the number of first category, or "most dangerous and hostile,” offenders to "be shot” and for a second category to be sentenced to eight - to ten-year terms in camps. The Gulag camps were grouped together as a sixty-fifth region; its inmates were automatically placed in the first category; they were already in prison. The sixty-five regional limits (which we do not reproduce due to space limitation) ranged from lows of four hundred for small areas like Komi or the Kalmyk province to a high of 35,000 for Moscow province. The largest numbers of executions were scheduled for the Gulag (10,000) and for Moscow and Leningrad province and Western Siberia (4,000 each). The totals are not given but they add up to 75,950 executions and 193,000 prison sentences.
In economic planning, plant managers rarely asked for higher plans; Ezhov's terror plan, however, encouraged requests for higher limits: "In cases where circumstances demand a raising of limits,” regional NKVD offices "must present to me [again the use of first person] petitions justifying the request.” This hint from Ezhov was taken to heart by the sixty-five regions, whose leaders concluded that to not ask for higher limits would be taken as a sign of "bureaucratic inertia” or even taken as the action of a class enemy. Requests for higher limits flooded into Ezhov's and Stalin's offices in a frenzy of "socialist competition.” In the language of 00447:
II. About Measures of Punishment and the Numbers of Those To Be Repressed
1. All kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements to be repressed are to be divided into two categories:
A) The first category includes the most dangerous and most hostile of the above listed elements. They should be immediately arrested and after examination of their cases by troikas are—to be shot.
B) In the second category are the remaining less active but nonetheless hostile elements. They are to be arrested and placed in camps for terms of 8 to 10 years, but the most evil and socially dangerous should be sentenced to prisons according to the specification of the troika.
3. The approved figures are for orientation purposes. The heads of the republican NKVDs and the directors of regional and provincial NKVD administrations do not have the authority to exceed them independently. No arbitrary raising of the figures is allowed.14
World History
