In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as a deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs – the infamous NKVD - the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, the organization carried out the Great Purge which was the imprisonment or execution of a huge number, possibly over a million, of citizens throughout the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the people” between August 1936 and March 1938.
Upon Stalin’s rise to power, some members of the former Bolshevik party began to question his authority. An investigation that revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's rivals. By the mid-1930s, Stalin believed anyone with ties to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government was a threat to his leadership and needed to go.
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