Was Beria thaw in USSR real? On issue of repression victims rehabilitation

The late 1930s became the time of weakening of the repression policy, pursued by the USSRgovernment. The Soviet Party leadership made a decision to clean up. The decision was based on some objective reasons andprovided, first of all, political purges among NKVD agents by claiming some of them public enemies. Such enemies joined NKVDwith the aim of violating socialist laws, and their actions undermined not only NKVD's authority but also the Socialist Party body ingeneral. On November 17, 1938 the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Organisation Bureau of the CentralCommittee enacted a law On Arrests, Public Prosecutor's Control and Investigation Management, directly addressed to NKVD units,public prosecutor's offices and to all the levels of the Central Committee of the Socialist Party, including its municipal and districtcommittees. The Resolution provided the balance between the procedural penal code and rules of arrest and investigation procedures.On the base of this document several internal regulatory legal acts of NKVD were passed. According to these papers there wereorganized reviews of some criminal cases, especially those at the investigation stage, and complaints from convicted people or prisonersand their relatives. Criminal cases by NKVD employees claimed as public enemies were reviewed first of all. According to thisinitiative a part of guiltlessly convicted persons was discharged. However, the number of the discharged people did not exceed severaltens of thousands people. It is now impossible to define the precise number of the released people. But according to the archive datacollected from Tomsk, Kemerovo and Altai regions the share of the discharged people is about 1.5% of the total number of peoplearrested during the repression time in 1937-1938. It is less than 900 persons of almost 54 thousand of the arrested. The work on caserevision did not properly develop due to its ineffective mechanisms and lack of interest of the NKVD workers in the regions, etc. Alsothe law raised the problem of organization of further prevention of public enemies, which became one of the top priority tasks forNKVD operational activities. Thus the first wave of repression victims' rehabilitation was not on a mass scale. Some researches connectthe procedure of political cases retrial with the name of L. Beria. They see his great service in this process. But it is pure invention. TheSoviet Party leadership demonstrated willingness to show care of Soviet citizens by the redress of repression victims' grievances, byfinding the guilty of the illegal actions, taken by the government directions.

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