In 1934 the OGPU was absorbed into the new NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), which helped Stalin to consolidate his power by carrying out purges . More than 750,000 people were executed in 1937–38 alone, including tens of thousands of party officials and military and security officers.
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Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs. He supervised the ruthless 1930s purges in the region and arrived in Moscow in 1938 as deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, ‘the blood-thirsty dwarf’, head of the Soviet secret police. He soon succeeded Yezhov, who was shot on Stalin’s orders, apparently at Beria’s prompting. Beria, who went on to run the Soviet network of slave-labour camps (Gulag camps). After WW2, he organized the communist takeover of the state institutions of Central and Eastern Europe.Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it absolute priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Beria's NKVD.