NKVD

The NKVD, the Soviet security and secret-police apparatus, shapes the history of Boris Gromov as Lieutenant Mamiya hears it in a Siberian labor camp. It appears first as an instrument of state repression, then as the source of Gromov’s authority and anticipated rescue. In the camp, the possibility that the NKVD may restore him to power helps make a disgraced official dangerous even in confinement; later, its backing enables him to hollow out the prisoners’ limited self-government and consolidate control.

Origins and Political Work

According to the account Mamiya receives from Nikolai, Gromov was a major in the NKVD and was sent to Ulan Bator in 1938 as a military adviser. There he organized the Mongolian secret police on the NKVD model and took part in suppressing counterrevolutionary forces. The account describes a machinery of roundups, camps, torture, and executions: suspicion alone could place people in danger. The NKVD thus enters the narrative not as an abstract institution but as a model exported beyond the Soviet Union and embodied in Gromov’s career.

After the Battle of Nomonhan, Gromov was recalled to Moscow and reassigned to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, where he worked on purges of the former Polish Army. Nikolai’s account links Gromov’s reputation to the use of torture there and later in Moscow, where political arrests followed the German invasion and the Soviet leadership’s effort to explain its failure to anticipate the attack. Gromov’s methods, as Mamiya is told, served a political system that made accusations and coercion instruments of internal control.

Gromov’s Fall and Expected Protection

Gromov’s position finally collapsed after he ordered the torture and death of an armored battalion commander accused of communicating with a German unit. The commander was later found innocent and was related to a senior Communist Party official; the Red Army’s investigation also made the case an affront to its standing. Gromov was stripped of rank, tried, and sentenced to death with his Mongolian adjutant. The adjutant was hanged, but Gromov’s sentence was reduced to hard labor in a concentration camp.

Nikolai reports that Beria sent Gromov a secret message promising to use his influence in the army and party to secure his release and eventual return to power after a year. This promise was hearsay within the camp, not a confirmed rescue. Yet it shaped how others treated Gromov: they believed he remained protected, feared that political circumstances could shift, and saw any conflict with him as a possible future death sentence. The NKVD’s power therefore operates both through official decisions and through the threat of what it might do next.

The Camp’s Informal Rule

Gromov did not return to Moscow. Instead, after gaining influence in the Siberian camp, he used secret-police support to establish a position stronger than that of the newly arrived Politburo member. The Japanese prisoners were granted partial autonomy and formed a representative committee, but the reforms concealed a transfer of power. Gromov selected violent guards from among prisoners and civilians, armed them, and used them to intimidate and attack opponents. Regular soldiers largely kept their distance, while Gromov’s private force enforced his authority.

The NKVD’s backing helped make this informal regime durable. Gromov moved into comfortable quarters, amassed wealth, and controlled camp operations while presenting himself as part of a larger political undertaking. He told Mamiya that profits from diverted relief supplies and black-market coal supported secret-police activity. Mamiya suspected that much of the money instead became Gromov’s private fortune, including funds sent abroad and investments in gold. The account leaves the exact division uncertain, but shows how the language of state service could mask personal enrichment.

Narrative Significance

The NKVD links state violence to the camp’s local economy of fear. Gromov’s career, as Mamiya learns it, moves from organizing a secret police force to exercising private power under the expectation of political protection. In the camp, the appearance of prisoner self-government does not end coercion: it provides cover for a new arrangement in which Gromov’s armed followers, secret-police connections, and control of resources reinforce one another.

The institution’s reach is also indirect. The narrative gives no direct scene of the NKVD issuing orders in the camp; instead, its influence arrives through Nikolai’s account, the rumored promise from Beria, secret communications with Moscow, and Gromov’s confidence that he can act without consequence. That distance matters: the prisoners cannot appeal to an accessible authority when the institution they might fear is itself part of the explanation for Gromov’s impunity. The NKVD is thus presented as a source of both organized repression and the uncertainty that keeps others from resisting.