NKVD

American  

1. in the U.S.S.R., the government's secret-police organization (1917–30; 1934–46).

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NKVD British  

abbreviation

1. (formerly) People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs: the Soviet police and secret police from 1934 to 1943: the police from 1943 to 1946

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Etymology

Origin of NKVD

From Russian N(aródnyĭ) K(omissariát) V(nútrennikh) D(el) “People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs”

Example Sentences

The OGPU's functions were later transferred to the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which carried out the worst of Stalin's repression.

From Reuters

To understand Russia today, it is necessary to reach back to Stalin’s Great Terror, when the secret police were called NKVD.

From Washington Post

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Russian journalists who have written often about the Russian secret police, say in Foreign Affairs that the Federal Security Service, or FSB, has been turned into “a far more expansive arm of an increasingly ruthless state. In its sweeping reach into domestic society, foreign affairs, and the military, the FSB has begun to look less like its late-Soviet predecessor, the KGB. It now resembles something much scarier: the NKVD, Stalin’s notorious secret police, which conducted the great purges of the 1930s.”

From Washington Post

Vladimir Putin, who was formed, or deformed, in the KGB, successor to the NKVD, has continued the tradition that produced Mercader.

From Washington Post

“Is there now a consensus among all 50 States that physicians are to be muzzled, silenced, and have their lives destroyed in case they do not agree with the new NKVD?”

From Los Angeles Times