NKVD Units
The footnotes for Valor of the Guards says that the NKVD were Stalin's equivalent of the SS. This is not particularly accurate. If anything, the NKVD were the equivalent of the Gestapo.
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Formed in December of 1917 as the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the NKVD was reformed and renamed in 1922. The NKVD was to be the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for security, policing, interrogation and internment. As a result, it became highly politicized and acted to perform all manner of political repression.
However, unlike a normal interior ministry, the NKVD also had a substantial international component. It was the NKVD that assassinated, among others, Leon Trotsky in Mexico. They also became responsible for doling out Soviet military aid during the Spanish Civil War.
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the NKVD held direct talks with the German Gestapo to turn over Austrian and German communists--essentially handing them a death sentence.
NKVD units were embroiled in the war as they had responsibility for border and internal security. It is worth pointing out that a HUGE amount of the blame for the early losses. In the first days of Barbarossa, the Soviets lacked adequate radio transmission (and didn't trust radios anyway) and had a great dependency on wire communications. One of the great untold stories of WWII was German success in dark ops against the Soviet wire communication networks in the opening stage of the invasion of the Soviet Union. This was the direct responsibility of the NKVD and the fault of these early communication problems--which led directly to many of the encirclement battles--can be laid directly at their doorstep.
The NKVD however, was operating large numbers of lightly armed security troops. Contrary to what we have come to expect, it was pretty rare that NKVD troops were used in combat positions. As portrayed in the Valor of the Guards, the 10th NKVD Rifle Division was one of those cases.
However, from the ASL context, let's examine the role of NKVD units and the ASL rules that make them a unique force.
According to VotG22, NKVD MMC are second line units with and underlined morale and (therefore) an ELR of 5. This means they casualty reduce if a commissar (their leadership force) fails to rally them. When they self-rally, their leader created is a commissar. They don't have assault fire and their benefits are morale-oriented, rather than offensive. NKVD companies purchased have less likelihood of having SW.
Note: You can only buy NKVD companies on the initial scenario of VotG, so you certainly should do so. You only get a handful of the special SMG units (the rest will be conscripts.)
Again, the VotG footnote on NKVD troops says, inaccurately, that the NKVD are the Soviet equivalent of the SS. So what are they? Well, given their composition in VotG they are ad hoc units composed of militia and stragglers backed up by tough veteran security troops ready to mete out discipline.
The result is that the militia and stragglers melt away and you have the tough veteran security troops holding strong points. With a broken side morale of 9, holding a fanatic strong point and being rallied by commissars, they don't need to rout and bounce back really fast. (For example a 9 morale level, fanatic, being rallied by a commissar will rally on a 10 even under DM.)
However, the NKVD didn't really work this way. I think the VotG participants are supposed to be blocking troops. Blocking troops are supposed to gather up stragglers and reform them into units and return them into the fight. Kind of a mass rally of companies, usually where company command had been decapitated or if retreating under orders the NKVD would decapitate the company command and install new leaders.
The NKVD did not, as you might expect, run the penal battalions (shtraftbat) themselves as they did not lead the unit but turned them over to the Red Army for leadership.
Historians generally disagree the extent to which charges were made with MGs at the backs of conscript units. However, first hand Red Army accounts say this rarely, if ever, happened. Certainly, blocking units did mete out extraordinary discipline in some cases (but the fact that these are called extraordinary is a tell.) No doubt, there was a lot of tactical ham-handedness.
So the role of the NKVD was gathering up the flotsam and jetsam of the retreating Red Army (and the elimination of an officer class that didn't have the stuff), rather than acting as a strong point defense. But, then the defense of downtown Stalingrad was a extraordinary situation of extraordinary situations.
At any rate, we aren't going to fix this, so we have to play it is as described in the game. However, keep in mind that this really wasn't the role that the NKVD had and it all stems from that first statement in VotG4, the falsehood that the NKVD was the Soviet version of the SS.
However, unlike a normal interior ministry, the NKVD also had a substantial international component. It was the NKVD that assassinated, among others, Leon Trotsky in Mexico. They also became responsible for doling out Soviet military aid during the Spanish Civil War.
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the NKVD held direct talks with the German Gestapo to turn over Austrian and German communists--essentially handing them a death sentence.
NKVD units were embroiled in the war as they had responsibility for border and internal security. It is worth pointing out that a HUGE amount of the blame for the early losses. In the first days of Barbarossa, the Soviets lacked adequate radio transmission (and didn't trust radios anyway) and had a great dependency on wire communications. One of the great untold stories of WWII was German success in dark ops against the Soviet wire communication networks in the opening stage of the invasion of the Soviet Union. This was the direct responsibility of the NKVD and the fault of these early communication problems--which led directly to many of the encirclement battles--can be laid directly at their doorstep.
The NKVD however, was operating large numbers of lightly armed security troops. Contrary to what we have come to expect, it was pretty rare that NKVD troops were used in combat positions. As portrayed in the Valor of the Guards, the 10th NKVD Rifle Division was one of those cases.
However, from the ASL context, let's examine the role of NKVD units and the ASL rules that make them a unique force.
According to VotG22, NKVD MMC are second line units with and underlined morale and (therefore) an ELR of 5. This means they casualty reduce if a commissar (their leadership force) fails to rally them. When they self-rally, their leader created is a commissar. They don't have assault fire and their benefits are morale-oriented, rather than offensive. NKVD companies purchased have less likelihood of having SW.
Note: You can only buy NKVD companies on the initial scenario of VotG, so you certainly should do so. You only get a handful of the special SMG units (the rest will be conscripts.)
Again, the VotG footnote on NKVD troops says, inaccurately, that the NKVD are the Soviet equivalent of the SS. So what are they? Well, given their composition in VotG they are ad hoc units composed of militia and stragglers backed up by tough veteran security troops ready to mete out discipline.
The result is that the militia and stragglers melt away and you have the tough veteran security troops holding strong points. With a broken side morale of 9, holding a fanatic strong point and being rallied by commissars, they don't need to rout and bounce back really fast. (For example a 9 morale level, fanatic, being rallied by a commissar will rally on a 10 even under DM.)
However, the NKVD didn't really work this way. I think the VotG participants are supposed to be blocking troops. Blocking troops are supposed to gather up stragglers and reform them into units and return them into the fight. Kind of a mass rally of companies, usually where company command had been decapitated or if retreating under orders the NKVD would decapitate the company command and install new leaders.
The NKVD did not, as you might expect, run the penal battalions (shtraftbat) themselves as they did not lead the unit but turned them over to the Red Army for leadership.
So the role of the NKVD was gathering up the flotsam and jetsam of the retreating Red Army (and the elimination of an officer class that didn't have the stuff), rather than acting as a strong point defense. But, then the defense of downtown Stalingrad was a extraordinary situation of extraordinary situations.
At any rate, we aren't going to fix this, so we have to play it is as described in the game. However, keep in mind that this really wasn't the role that the NKVD had and it all stems from that first statement in VotG4, the falsehood that the NKVD was the Soviet version of the SS.
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