Question

How many people did Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, kill in 1937 and in 1938 ?

Answer 1

Hint:NKVD of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was an agency that was established in 1917 who were appointed to conduct regular police work and monitor the country's prisons which were duped as labour camps. Even though It was disbanded in 1930 and their functions being distributed among other agencies but were reinstated as an all-union ministry in 1934.

Complete answer:
 During the period 1937-1938 NKVD conducted a mass ethnic cleansing by the name The Polish Operation. It was carried out in the Soviet Union against the Poles who were put under the label “agents" during the period of the Great Purge. An order by the Politburo of the Communist Party called them "Polish spies" and these people were interpreted by the NKVD officials just for being 'absolutely all Poles'. This ended up in the sentencing of 139,835 people and executions of 111,091 Poles living within the Soviet Union borders. The operation was carried out by the NKVD under the Order No. 00485 signed by a higher police official named Nikolai Yezhov. A huge number of the shooting victims were ethnically Polish but some other people were of various minority groups from the Kresy macro-region because they had some element of Polish culture or heritage, and were therefore also called "Polish" in the regions. Other individuals were 'suspected' of being Polish, without any form of inquiry. In order to speed up the process, the NKVD personnel took the extent to review the local telephone books and arrested persons with Polish-sounding names.

Note:Almost all victims of the NKVD shootings were men who had families. Their wives and children were deported to Kazakhstan for a decade. Orphaned children without relatives were put in orphanages in order for them to be brought up as Soviets without any knowledge of their origins. All possessions of the accused were confiscated. The parents of the executed were left with nothing which usually sealed their fate as well.