On 15 November 1923, the GPU was dissolved and reformed into the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) with its jurisdiction covering the entirety of the Soviet Union. Its official full name was the Joint State Political Directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (Объединённое государственное политическое управление при СНК СССР, Ob"yedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye pri SNK SSSR), though the name is also translated as the All-Union State Political Administration or as Unified State Political Directorate. Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had served as the chairman of the State Political Directorate and of the Cheka, was appointed as the OGPU's first chief.
The OSNAZ (ОСНАЗ), a militarised section of the Cheka, had originated in 1921;[1]
it became a component of OGPU.
The OGPU, like the GPU before it, was in theory supposed to operate with more restraint than the Cheka, which had orchestrated the Red Terror from 1918 to 1922. Unlike the Cheka, the OGPU could not shoot "counter-revolutionaries" at will, and most suspected political criminals had to be brought before a judge. The OGPU's powers increased greatly in 1926, when the Soviet criminal code [ru] was amended to include Article 58, a section on anti-state terrorism. The provisions were vaguely written and very broadly interpreted. Even before then, OGPU had set up tribunals to try the most exceptional cases of terrorism, usually without calling any witnesses.[2] In time, the OGPU's de facto powers grew even greater than those of the Cheka. The OGPU achieved perhaps its most spectacular success with the Trust Operation of 1924–1925. OGPU agents contacted White émigrés and anti-communists in Western Europe and pretended to represent a large group, known as "the Trust", working to overthrow the communist régime. Exiled Russians gave "the Trust" large sums of money and supplies, as did foreign intelligence agencies. Soviet agents finally succeeded in luring one of the leading anti-communist operators, Sidney Reilly, into Russia to meet with the Trust. Once in the Soviet Union in September 1925, Reilly was arrested and executed. The Trust was then dissolved, having become a huge propaganda success. Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 and was succeeded as chief of the OGPU by deputy chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky.
From 1927 to 1929, the OGPU engaged in intensive investigations of an opposition coup d'etat. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issued a public decree that any and all opposition views should be considered dangerous and gave the OGPU the authority to seek out "hostile elements." That led in March 1928 to the Shakhty Trial, which saw the prosecution of a group of supposed industrial saboteurs allegedly involved in a hostile conspiracy. That would be the first of many trials during Stalin's rule. The OGPU planned and set up the Gulag system, and also became the Soviet government's arm for the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Greek Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church, Islam and other religious organizations, in an operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov. The OGPU was also the principal secret police agency responsible for the detection, arrest, and liquidation of anarchists and other dissident left-wing factions in the early Soviet Union. It also enforced the Dekulakization campaigns during the First Five-Year Plan through extrajudicial special troikas of local OGPU agents, Communist Party officials, and state procurators with the authority to sentence suspects to exile or death without a formal trial in the Soviet judicial system.[3] OGPU troops took part in Soviet invasion of Xinjiang.[4]
Dissolution
Menzhinsky's health had deteriorated rapidly during his directorship of the OGPU and Stalin tended to deal with his first deputy, Genrikh Yagoda, who essentially took over as head in the late 1920s. Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid until his death in May 1934, for which Yagoda would later be blamed in the Trial of the Twenty One.
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Степаков, Виктор (2002). Spetsnaz Rossii Спецназ России [Spetsnaz of Russia]. Серия "Досье. Спецслужбы мира" (in Russian). Saint Petersburg: ОЛМА Медиа Групп. p. 14. ISBN9785765424254. Retrieved 26 January 2024. [...] 1921 г. при Президиуме ВЧК был создан Отряд особого назначения (ОСНАЗ). Он включал в себя: штаб батальона, три стрелковые роты, команду связи, хозяйственную команду, обоз батальона и кавалерийский эскадрон, всего 1097 бойцов [...].
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