had control over the target groups, the size of the initial limits, the extension of the deadline for completing the operation, the relationship between the initial limits and the final number of victims" Initially, the target groups were limited to only Kulaks and criminals. After some time it broadened to enemies of the Motherland. The chairman of a troika was the chief of the corresponding territorial subdivision of NKVD (People's Commissar of a republican NKVD, etc.). Usually a troika included the prosecutor of the republic/krai/oblast in question; if not, he was allowed to be present at the session of a troika. The third person was usually the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) secretary of the corresponding regional level. The staff of these troikas were personally specified in the Order No. 00447. While Order 00447 decreed the personal constitution of all troikas, in the course of the Purge many members of troikas were repressed themselves, so the staff of troikas varied over time. Protocols of a troika session were passed to the corresponding operative group for executions of sentences. Times and places of executions of death sentences were ordered to be held in secret. Troikas of this purpose were established for a period of 4 months, but functioned for about a year. When Operation No. 00447 was finally stopped, on November 17, 1938, by the Decree about Arrests, Prosecutor Supervision and Course of Investigation, issued jointly by the Sovnarkom and Central Committee of the CPSU, it is estimated that up to 767,000 persons had been condemned, of whom 387,000 had been executed by shooting. The "National Operations" On August 11, 1937, following a Politburo top-secret resolution taken two days earlier, Nikolai Yezhov issued another secret directive, Order No. 00485, aimed at "the complete liquidation of local branches of the Polish Military Organization (POW) and its networks of spies, wreckers and terrorists in industry, transport and agriculture". Due to a backlog of people being processed by "dvoikas" (two person extrajudicial commissions) as part of the Polish Operations, on September 15, 1938 the Politburo issued the resolution (# П64/22) about the creation of special troikas (Особая тройка) for the period of the Polish operation of the NKVD. Order No. 00485 served as a model for a series of similar NKVD "National Operations" targeting a number of the Soviet Union's diaspora nationalities and ethnic groups: the German, Finnish, Latvian, Estonian, Romanian, Greek,