The Special Board, an administrative court that pronounced judgements in the absence of the person concerned, is not an invention of the Communists. But while they took over this useful tool from the tsarist punitive system, they developed it in a way that would have been inconceivable under the reign of the tsar.
"The Special Board of the OGPU Collegium" (OGPU = USSR United Main Political Administration) operated during the 1920s. But it was more or less taken over by the territorial "special three-member boards," which appeared late in 1929. In 1936 and the first half of 1937 the NKVD Special Board (NKVD = People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) pronounced most of the sentences by which individuals were condemned to camp detention. During the period of the Great Terror it was given a subordinate role again. During these years the OSO (Special Board) usually decided the camp terms and occasionally exile terms or "banishment." These were also called "minuses" in which banished individuals were prohibited from living in a certain number of cities defined by name.
As of 1939 the "Special Board" came once again to the fore. It also now began to sentence individuals to capital punishment (death by shooting). The executions of Polish prisoners of war in 1940 were determined by decision of this OSO. It was also actively used during the war.
In the second half of the 1940s the NKVD OSO (and from 1946, the MGB OSO, i.e. the OSO under the Ministry of State Security) served as an auxiliary but still important tool for the legalized issue of files on those in the anti-Soviet resistance movements in the Baltic states and those Polish territories that had been annexed by the USSR.
All files sent to the OSO were sewn together with a white thread so that courts and military courts (and even courts of the NKVD / MVD troops) would refrain from turning them around to work on them.
They continued to use this procedure during the war, in connection with the files on traitors to the country. The majority of Hitler's true accomplices succeeded in disappearing after all, and the planned quota for traitors had to be fulfilled anyway.
In the end, the MG OSO perfectly suited the times, such as from 1948-1950 when the Communists started to seize all "Pavtorniki", i. e. "repeaters" [former prisoners, who had been convicted to section 58 except those who had merely been convicted to section 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda and counter-revolutionary agitation)] and legalized the documents to send them into exile for an unlimited period, a "Settlement to all eternity."
As a rule, they did not issue any new files on these "repeaters" but being true Communists, simply reimprisoned or exiled them again on the basis of a fabricated case, usually on the identical charge for which they had received their first sentence.
The MGB OSO died immediately after Stalin, the genius of all times and peoples, did.