Ensuring Legality and Service Discipline in the NKVD Bodies of the Far East during the Great Patriotic War

The authors examine the service discipline and legality in the territorial bodies of the NKVD of the Far East during the Great Patriotic War, the reasons for the commission of offenses by the NKVD employees, the specificity of bringing perpetrators to justice, as well as forms and methods of preventive work with the personnel. The source base for the analysis was the internal documentation of the NKVD departments of the Khabarovsk and Primorsky Territories, as well as the materials of primary party organizations stored in the regional archives of the subjects of the Russian Federation. There were also used the documents of the central office of the NKVD of the USSR, the Procurator's office of the USSR and the CPSU Central Committee Politburo stored respectively in the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the Russian State Archive of Modern History. Studying the problem, it was possible not only to state the facts of the unfavorable situation in the field of discipline and legality, but also to establish the determinants of these phenomena. In the course of the study, there was largely confirmed the fact repeatedly noted in historiography concerning the influence of the staff shortage and problems of material security on the effectiveness of the NKVD bodies in the war and post-war periods. It was established that the set of preventive measures aimed at strengthening discipline and legality included as follows: prevention of the employees’ moral decay; the use of methods of group responsibility; collective discussion of the most resonant violations of the rule of law; control by the NKVD leadership; personnel rotations; improvement of legal culture and literacy of the personnel; introduction of army methods of maintaining discipline.