In the Soviet Union of World War II, NKVD labor columns (Russian: рабочие колонны НКВД) were militarized labor formations created from certain categories of population, both fully rightful Soviet citizens, as well as categories of limited civil rights. They were primarily from the people of ethnicities associated with the countries that fought against the Soviet Union. The vast majority of them were ethnic Germans. In later literature these formations were informally referred to as "labor army", in an analogy with Soviet Labor armies of 1920-1921, although this term was not used in official Soviet documents in reference to 1941-1946.